After two decades in the experimental music scenes of New York and Western Massachusetts, Wednesday Knudsen might be known equally as a sought-after improv collaborator and the vocalist and guitarist for the beloved long-running psych band Pigeons, as a member of the New England folk rock ensemble Stella Kola, or the psych kraut supergroup Weeping Bong Band. Atrium, is Knudsen’s fifth solo album, marking her rich recording history with a stunning masterwork. Channeling the “atmosphere of presence” alongside the legions of Éliane Radigue, Hiroshi Yoshimura, and Joanna Brouk, on Atrium, Knudsen plays it all—alto saxophone, flute, guitar, synth, piano, autoharp, bass guitar, and vocals. Atrium’s tracks are sculptural rather than ambient, with a release into the gorgeous hold of gravity that insists we don’t escape or drift away. This is music for remembering time. 

While conceived and recorded independently and at different moments over a two-year span, each piece on Atrium was shaped as an occasion, a space, a timbral architecture exposing and inviting presence. The double LP is a soundscape or tone-portrait of the place they were made—the densely wooded hills of New York’s Taconic Mountains. Each piece is an effort toward a minimalism meeting the pace of nature, without the need for geographic recognition. These hills don’t impose on the listener, reverberating instead like an atrium to wherever and however you are.

Wednesday Knudsen’s solo work of recent years has not only solidified her as a composer but has dunked her songs in a tonality that she at one time veered away from: beauty, in its sincerity. Her process is rooted in what she calls “the joy of slowness,” of finding the quiet moments that are meaningful because they’re quiet. Atrium is the vital and expansive follow-up to Soft Focus: Volumes One and Two (Feeding Tube Records) released in 2022. For those of us who relish a visual stimulant, the color gradient cover of Atrium, designed by artist and musician Liz Durette, evocatively reinforces Knudsen’s sonic palette as tonally akin to the pure color of a Rothko painting.

Developing her craft as a multi-instrumentalist since her youth, it took Knudsen nearly two decades to arrive at her own distilled beautiful sound that is disentangled from the fuzz guitar-haze of her pillar underground band Pigeons. Records such as Jordan De La Sierra’s Gymnosphere: Song of the Rose, Harold Budd’s Pavilion of Dreams, and Éliane Radigue’s Biogenesis played roles gravitating Knudsen to stillness over the years, but it was only in spring of 2020, around when the pandemic first set in, that Knudsen experienced a full-on genre meltdown. Rock ‘n’ roll stopped making sense to her. She had to stop listening. She couldn’t relate to it anymore. She never believed rock ‘n’ roll was dead or invalid—she just needed to mute the wailing guitar solos to think. In the absence of rock ‘n’ roll, Knudsen asked herself, “What do I do on my own? Who am I? What do I like? What does it mean to come up against my own limitations in an environment where I'm the only actor?” She began answering these questions by releasing control of her output and submerging herself in a state of learning and humility, becoming a student again of her inner self, a place where the vibrant terrain of Atrium could emerge.

As equally as Atrium is an experience of presence, it is music that reinforces the power of art as resistance. The songs distill our attention in a language that Knudsen calls “the opening of the heart,” reminding us that subsistence and community results from our own actions and engagement with our exterior. Atrium is a refuge, vital in our current moment and imbued with resonant power for our future.