Felicia Atkinson with Sylvain Chauveau - 'Roman Anglais' (O Rosa) Released 10/03/08

This CD should come with a how to listen to instructions. Forget everything you thought you knew about music and listen to it as a sequence of sounds and images rather than the conventional lyric and melody partnership and you’ll find the 40 minute long ‘Roman Anglais’ curiously absorbing. Don’t be too scared by the French, it’s deliberately ambiguous anyhow.  ‘Roman Anglais’ is in a nutshell spoken word electro-acoustic minimalism. This means Felicia Atkinson gently talks over electronic sounds and selected instruments.
 
These aren’t just any sounds though as Sylvain Chauveau is an accomplished performer and composer of the genre and has worked on many a film soundtrack including films by Sébastien Betbeder and toured with Sigur Ros. Some of the sounds are beautifully evocative, like the guitar in the title track, others are painfully challenging and akin to nails down a blackboard - the beeping machinery used in ‘Dans La Lumiere’ is unsettling. Chauveau and Atkinson have been performing together for nearly 5 years, first showcasing their sound in the UK at Hull’s Seeds And Bridges festival in 2006 but ‘Roman Anglais’ is their debut recording together.
 
‘How The Light’ was inspired by Atkinson’s woodland walks with her Polish mother features melodic sweeps of gentle guitar. It’s the most conventionally melodic track on ‘Roman Anglais’ as Atkinson skips between languages with grace. The combination of words and sounds makes this a very still affair, which although effective can perhaps drag on a little, but that seems to be quintessential to the project as there is a purposeful delayed gap between each track.
 
Even the title track, translated as ‘English Novel’ is a baffling tale of loneliness despite being mostly in English. It’s all very atmospheric and Atkinson’s phrasing lulls you into a sense of the unknown. There’s a perfect synchronicity between the dialogue and sounds. “There’s no doors but she’s locked in the night each hour after each hour locked in the night.”
 
It has soothing quality about it all, but actually it’s very hard to listen to. It’s so ambiguous that it meanders between being highly original and deliberately pretentious. ‘Roman Anglais’ is an intense venture by two people with a shared vision, who artistically compliment each other very well. Atkinson’s voice may grate to begin with due to its breathy quality but it’s worth persevering with, even if you only listen to the whole thing once. If you can’t then skip to the title track and work your way backwards because the title track is probably the most accessible.
 
Whether or not it will appeal to many people is another proposition entirely, but you get the feeling it’s crafted out of passion rather than anything to do with mass appeal. It’s folk Jim, but not as we know it.