Following her recent collaborative album with Christina Vantzou, Reflections Vol. 3: Water Poems, French musician and artist Félicia Atkinson returns with SANS VISAGE, a reimagined score for Georges Franju’s 1960 horror classic Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face). The album arrives on June 26th via Viernulvier Records, with lead preview Les Yeux II.
The commission came from Belgian cultural centre VIERNULVIER for its Videodroom series, which has previously seen artists including claire rousay, Mabe Fratti and Lee Ranaldo write new scores for cult and genre cinema. Atkinson first encountered Franju’s film as a teenager around the turn of the century, and her response engages both with its larger themes and with its moment-by-moment unfolding. Piano is embedded into an electroacoustic topography that nods to the playful, surgical approach of the pioneering French studio GRM.
Atkinson envisioned her music as something akin to the air moving through and beyond the many cages that appear in the film — cages holding the victims of a surgeon determined to graft a new face onto his daughter, Christiane Génessier, who lost hers in a car accident while he was behind the wheel. The record is dedicated to Gisèle Pelicot. “Through the music, I decided to bring back their empowerment despite what they endure,” says Atkinson. “This is why the record is also dedicated to Gisèle Pelicot, whose trial happened while I was in the process of composing the music and kept thinking of her strength and her decision to share her trial in order to reverse the shame.”
The recorded version is a 34-minute synthesis of the full 90-minute score, presented on LP alongside an essay by writer-musician Claire Cronin and drawings by Momo Gordon. SANS VISAGE follows Atkinson’s acclaimed solo releases Promenades and Space as an Instrument on Shelter Press.
Pre-Order: https://feliciaatkinson.bandcamp.com/album/sans-visage
Shows
May 2 – Brooklyn, NY @ Public Records
May 6 – Minneapolis, MN @ Berlin
May 8 – Chicago, IL @ Renaissance Society
May 26 – Vilnius, Lithuania @ Composer’s House
June 5 – Helsinki, Finland @ Publics