Released: 2018
Label: Noton
Genre: Contemporary
Though routinely gorgeous, her work is rarely relaxing, rarely comfortable. Atkinson actively situates her compositions in the intimate, unruly liminal space between comfort and discomfort, quiet and disquiet. This remains true of her new record, the To fully appreciate Ryuichi Sakamoto’s latest collaboration with German minimalist Carsten Nicolai (Alva Noto), check out the video recording of their Glass performance on Vimeo. This is a complex piece, at least relative to most of what the two have presented in the past. Seeing how it came together at Philip Johnson’s celebrated Glass House is part of the fun.
That house has a remarkable history. Johnson designed it between 1945 and 1948. Completed in 1949, Glass House influenced U.S. architecture profoundly, effectively launching the so-called International Style.
Glass is a kind of celebration of that space, and the house itself served as an instrument; Sakamoto taps, pats and drags rubber-headed gong mallets across its rain-soaked walls. They shriek and echo, as though from a distance. Not only does this incorporate the piece’s subject, it reminds us that part of the magic of Glass House is its connection to the surrounding landscape. The Flower And The Vessel, a work made not “while” pregnant, she asserts, but with pregnancy. A work made in part, she says, to reassert her connection to the world. Exclaim!
The Moderns 
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