** Edition of 300. Glacial Blue Vinyl ** A meeting in tidal waters. Sixteen years in the making. On Reflections Vol. 3: Water Poems, Félicia Atkinson and Christina Vantzou release their first full-length collaboration, arriving as the third installment of RVNG Intl.'s ongoing Reflections series - contemporary convergences, orchestrated with care.

The two artists first met in 2009 and have circled one another ever since, sharing stages intermittently, most notably at the Philharmonie de Paris in 2019 - the concert that ultimately catalyzed this record. What they bring to Water Poems is shaped by where they now live: Atkinson on the Normandy coast facing the Channel, Vantzou on the Mediterranean, in Greece. The sea enters the album not as backdrop or metaphor but as a living presence - what Atkinson describes as "an energy, a mystery, a complex character we face every day."

Recorded between three sites of accumulated memory - the Old Carpet Factory, an 18th-century mansion on the Greek island of Hydra; Villa Medici, the 16th-century villa in Rome; and Les Dunes, Atkinson's home studio in Normandy - the album threads field recordings from the archaeological site of Delphi and the thermal waters of Eftalou on Lesvos through an electro-acoustic instrumentation of considerable breadth: piano, Rhodes, Mellotron, synthesizers, vibraphone, gong, metallophone, guitars, processed liquids. The eight tracks breathe at a patient tempo, words emerging and receding in French and English, voices addressing one another with the hushed intimacy of conversation overheard near water. "How can a boat float? How can a plane fly? How can a body swim? How can a person dream?"

There is something ceremonial at work here. Vantzou, half of the acclaimed duo The Dead Texan alongside Adam Wiltzie, has long moved in the harmonic terrain first mapped by Stars of the Lid, but Water Poems finds her extending her palette toward the spoken - a territory Atkinson has quietly defined across her releases for Shelter Press. The record drifts, yes, but its drift is purposeful, tidal, culminating in the nine-minute Scorpio Purple Skies, where John Also Bennett adds electric and lap steel guitar, pulling the album's closing horizon into something cinematic and unresolved. The piano on Shines for Eternity sits close to the neo-classical. The undercurrent on With / You / Movement / Creatures - vibraphone, gong, synths - draws from the same well as the finest Japanese kankyō ongaku of the 1980s.

Mastered by Stephan Mathieu and cut by Josh Bonati, issued by RVNG Intl. in a limited Glacial Blue Vinyl edition of 300 copies. Photographs by Natasha Giannaraki, design by Will Work for Good. One to file alongside the most careful ambient records of recent years - a record that asks less of the ear than of the body, that trusts slowness, that knows exactly how little it needs to do to open a door.