Félicia Atkinson

Parisian-born artist Félicia Atkinson’s multifaceted work embraces improvisation, science-fiction, composition, chance, noise, abstraction and poetry. Her sound palette draws from the history of electronics, musique concrète, field recordings and improvisation through the use of guitar and piano, abstract distortions, text-sound and infra bass. 

At Sound Spaces, Félicia will present a new work for voice, electronics and found sounds called ‘Vermillion’ which responds to the exhibition Future Eaters by drawing on J. G Ballard’s collection of essays ‘Vermillion Sands’ (1971). Rooted in her experiences of deserts this live set will be escapist, textual and at times concrete.

Félicia’s recent album ‘Hand in Hand’ has generated a great deal of curiosity, excitement and intrigue, with Fact Magazine writing that Atkinson takes “the dying bleat of obsolete technology, the crack and stutter of her own voice, the atonal clatter of intuitively-played instruments – and sculpts them into flawless vignettes that lodge themselves deep in the psyche. Like the dystopian science fiction it references, Hand in Hand is bewitching, intense, meditative and at times, deeply unsettling.”

Gail Priest

In an attempt to preference the aural over the visual in our dreaming, Gail has been speculating as to what art in the future will sound like. The result is a body of ficto-critical material that explores the Future Human — the integration of technology and biology resulting in trans- and post-human conditions; and the Future City — the exploitation of the sonic potentials of the new cities we imagine. For this performance, Gail will create a live mash-down of her sonic speculations offering a fractured forecast of the future of listening.

Gail Priest is a sound artist based in Katoomba (NSW) making experimental audio that explores the interaction of the figurative and the abstract, the machinic and the organic, the spoken and the ineffable. Recently she has been attempting to find a mode that brings together both her practice as a sound maker and as sound writer. This has manifested in the three year project Sounding the Future (2014-2017), and continues with her investigations into a poetic language of listening explored in her upcoming commission for Experimenta Make Sense (October 2017). Originally trained in theatre she has worked as a sound designer/composer for dance and theatre works, exhibits audio installations and releases experimental music in multiple formats. She is also a curator and writes extensively about sound and media arts, in particular for RealTime magazine, and was the editor of Experimental Music: audio explorations in Australia through UNSW Press (2009).