Félicia Atkinson & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma – Un hiver en plein été LP

Over the last 5 years the duo of Félicia Atkinson & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma have intertwined sublime sonorities across the geographic expanses between their respective homes in France and the United States. Their third album for Shelter Press, ‘Un hiver en plein été’ (‘A winter in the middle
of summer’) – the first to have been largely recorded by Atkinson and Cantu-Ledesma together

in the same space – distills a mesmerizing pallet of acoustic and electronic sources into an open discourse of radically poetic forms, offering glimpses of warmth and intimacy waiting in the post-covid world to come.

Both veteran experimentalists with celebrated bodies of solo work behind them – each traversing the challenges of electroacoustic practice in their own singular ways – prior to their first recorded outing in 2016, Félicia Atkinson and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma had only crossed paths in person
once, initially meeting in San Fransisco during 2009. The mutual bond formed during that brief encounter flowered into their first LP, ‘Comme Un Seul Narcisse’, followed two years later by

2018’s ‘Limpid As The Solitudes’. Both recorded remotely – sending files back and forth, fortified
by conversations on a vast range of subjects – these two albums were guided by impassioned conceptual nods to Guy Debord, Baudelaire, Brion Gysin and Sylvia Plath, while seeking resolutions for the challenges and unique possibilities that working at a distance provoked.

Where the triumphs of its predecessors rose from the bridging of disparate moments and divergent spaces, ‘Un hiver en plein été’ culminates as a celebration of closeness, a result of Atkinson and Cantu-Ledesma working together in the studio, responsively in real time, for the first time. Recorded in Brooklyn during August of 2019 – a handful of months before the pandemic would impose chasmic distances across the globe – its six discrete works, carefully crafted

and finalized over the ensuing year, evolve seamlessly across the album’s two sides, weaving a sprawling tapestry of sonority, within which both artists retaining their own voices and visions, while drawing each other towards uncharted ground.

Crafted from deconstructed melodic elements and drifting long-tones – laden with subtle nods
to Indian classical ragas and free jazz – searching patterns of speech, textural elements captured within the studio and the outside world, and searching tonal and percussive interventions,
‘Un hiver en plein été’ coheres as a multi-faceted series of electroacoustic dialogues; nesting conversations between two artists working at the juncture of abstraction and narration, field recording and harmony, and the philosophical and phenomenological, in search for the meaning of friendship, and its manifestation in pure sound.