It has already been a fruitful year for Félicia Atkinson. The French composer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist released Reflections Vol. 3: Water Poems, a collaboration with Christina Vantzou, in April. That was a sweeping, cinematic suite of fluid compositions and evocative spoken word anchored in lush ambience. Atkinson’s preoccupation with film is explored even further in her latest work. Sans Visage is a reimagining of the score of Les Yeux Sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face), Georges Franju’s influential 1960 horror. Like many great films of the era, Eyes Without a Face was widely derided on release, but as understanding of its subtleties deepened, its stock grew. It has since become a touchstone for the psychological and body-horror genres, and an influence on filmmakers as different as John Woo, John Carpenter and Pedro Almodóvar.
The film uses the visual languages of surrealism and film noir to build up its slyly poetic atmosphere, something which makes Atkinson – a master of creepy-beautiful soundscapes – the perfect person for this assignment. Sans Visage is split into two halves, Les Yeux and Sans Visage, each of which is further divided so that there is a total of eleven discrete movements. All are based around piano and studio electronics. The album cover shows an image of wrought-iron gates, and cages, fences, bars and gates proliferate in the film. Atkinson has consciously chosen to create a music that flows through the gaps in these gates, a music that displays her customary fluidity while also tying in with a feminist reading of her subject matter that engages with ideas of female entrapment and emancipation, of assumed male dominance and masculine frailty. Tellingly, Atkinson dedicates the album to Gisèle Pelicot.
Atkinson is an expert at using silence as a kind of reflecting pool on which music can float, and the album grows out of an initial silence. It soon becomes hostile, sinister: an array of spooky electronic sounds and low ambient hums that, in Les Yeux II, settle into slow, rhythmic upsurges, a single note slowly pulsing and reaching into the empty air around it. High-pitched interjections that seem to blur the lines between the organic and the synthetic add further eeriness to the atmosphere. Les Yeux III is another series of drawn-out, slow-paced repetitions, this time cleaner and more melodic, but still haunting, while Les Yeux IV displays more complex interplay between electronics and treated piano.
There are a series of delicate contrasts in Sans Visage: the contrast between the tactile and the ephemeral, interiority and free-flowing movement, dissonance and melody, brevity and deep time. The short, billowing Les Yeux V and the stifled minimalism of Les Yeux VI both serve to emphasise these contrasts. And contrast begets tension, which is the preset atmospheric condition of any psychological horror. Atkinson taps into it expertly. Sans Visage I, which acts as a kind of centrepiece, plays out like a lengthy meditation on tension: high-wire electronic dissonance strives to gain the upper hand over sombre, Satie-esque piano notes. There is a controlled ebb and flow, a push and pull between the two that leads to an invisible off-stage resolution, a vanishing point that itself seems to have vanished.
As the album’s second half progresses, the eerie tension mounts, but so does a certain note of resistance. Sans Visage II’s electronics are a lesson in aural horror; its piano vacillates between the soft and the spooky. Sans Visage III is cold and withering, a Lynchian landscape decorated with a prettifying snow of piano notes. A highlight is Sans Visage IV, which sees the keys take centre stage to create a feeling of brittle and haunting nostalgia, while the final piece combines many of the album’s sonic elements into something more roiling and chaotic, a cloud vibrating with the promise of an electrical storm.
Sans Visage was commissioned by the Ghent-based cultural centre Viernulvier as part of their Videoroom series. Previous artists involved in the series include claire rousay, Mabe Fratti and Lee Renaldo. Atkinson’s instalment is a perfect example of how experimental music can bridge the gaps presented by time, genre and gender by instigating new dialogues. It also possesses its own spectral beauty, lingering and at times uncomfortable, but never less than enthralling.
Sans Visage (June 26th, 2026) Viernulvier Records/Shelter Press