Félicia Atkinson and Christina Vantzou’s Water Poems is Out Now!

“These are offerings to send to the sea. These are water poems.”

Félicia Atkinson and Christina Vantzou’s Water Poems flows from the tides to the listening shore today.

When they first met in 2009, Atkinson and Vantzou quickly felt an intuitive kinship—two artists living parallel paths, holding a mutual fascination with the sea, the stars, the relationship between nature and music. In 2017, the seeds of their collaboration took  root with the pair’s first performance at RVNG’s own Commend, but a 2019 concert at Paris’ Philharmonie catalyzed the endeavor.

Now both living in coastal areas (Félicia by the Channel in Belgium, Christina by the Mediterranean in France), the sea naturally became their aqueous muse. Their shared sound-sculpting took on a sacramental character: “A ceremonious feeling, a feeling of being in service, runs deep on this record,” Vantzou reflected. “I’ve felt this before, but it’s stronger here in process with Félicia.”

The duo’s conversation and creation expanded over time, and what began with close-mic’d vocal improvisations and field recordings soon enveloped synths, gongs and metallophones, piano, vibraphone, rhodes, guitars, and mellotron. Yet the album’s theme always cycled back to the sea, the coastline, the elemental power of stones and minerals.

Assembled from musings and recorded in places imbued with a strange magnetism, Water Poems is a celebration of the elemental, a collection of music invested in feeling, atmosphere and sound. A love letter to the sea, it’s also a tender document of a friendship, of a sisterhood, of the sonic correspondence between two truly inimitable artists.

Water Poems is out now, available in various vinyl, Japanese CD import via Plancha, and digital editions.