Félicia Atkinson, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma

Dreamlike second collaboration between Félicia Atkinson and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, a deeply affecting play of contrasting textures, densities and space that comes very highly recommended if you’re into Ryuichi Sakamoto’s collaborations with Alva Noto, La Monte Young, GRM’s 1970’s output, classic 4AD/Cocteau Twins, that incredible Autechre remix of Tortoise, or indeed Félicia Atkinson's scene stealing Hand In Hand album from last year...
‘Limpid as the Solitudes’ is the steeply immersive second collaboration between Félicia Atkinson and like-minded, explorative spirit Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. Both highly regarded for a sensually tactile approach to sound, they bring the best out of each other in an abstract, spectral form of songcraft indebted to shoegaze as much as concrète dreamscaping, millennial glitch works, and downtown drone classics.

Following from Felicia’s superb ‘Hand In Hand’ album and Jefre’s ‘Fragments of a Season’ side with Alexis Georgopoulos (Arp), the Franco-American duo humbly dissolve their egos into a sublime suite of hypnagogic drowse belied by a sense of widescreen detail and unpredictable arrangements that simultaneously beckons eyelids to half mast whilst encouraging listeners to remain in the waking world. This gentle push and pull of forces is a wonder to undergo, with an uncanny capacity to make time feel elastic, even polymetric and vertiginous.
To describe the album as ambient would indicate a much too passive engagement with the sound - leave it to play in the background and you’ll miss a lot of the joy. Felicia and Jefre describe the record as a series of postcards - “things and sounds that happen vertically as a slow ascension, vessels communicating in dreams”.
The first half breaks down to three pieces where fractured snatches of field recordings emerge over viscous drone beds and diffuse daubs of original instrumentation. Together, they resemble a form of sonic picnolepsy of overactive minds (yours and ours), where we attempt to fill in the gaps of their keening and precipitous collage of field recordings and original instrumentation, but soon enough succumb to their dream logic between he fragrant open space of ‘And The Flower Have Time For Me’, and the swirling axis of ‘Indefatigable Purple’, where Félicia’s ASMR murmurs mingle most beautifully detached bass pulses under a canopy of smudged keys.

But to be honest that all feels like preparation for the subtly keeling sensation impressed by the B-side, a 17 minute drift into vaporised sentiments that requires the connective tissue of your body and massaged senses to become complete.