Touch the breeze of the wailing ocean, heed the cry of the whale’s song, and get intrigued by the mythical deep with Félicia Atkinson & Christina Vantzou’s Reflection Vol. 3: Water Poems. Atkinson and Vantzou create a composition that feels like cool water lapping your toes. Its ambient, trancy synths calmly swim through the nine minutes of this song, but are sporadically disturbed by knell-like gongs that toil into a disturbing urgency. The urgency is threatened even greater with an eerie buzzing that dreadfully tickles the skin. Overlayed atop the droning, reconfiguring noise is a whisper of command. Yet, they only order once the discomforting prickle dissipates; a melancholically mystical resemblance of the way human presence calms the terrifying mystery of sea.
Reflection Vol. 3: Water Poems feels like an art piece. As in, I shouldn’t be listening to it on my computer, but instead should hear its echo playing atop a dim exhibit highlighting sea myths. The thinness of the synth compels a contemplative state. At times, it can be a little too sleepy when melded with the quiet murmuring of their whispers and the reeling vibraphone. There is a feeling that this song is simply a counterpart to another form of media. It is the breeze, but not the wind itself.
It makes sense however. Christina Vantzou specializes in orchestral ambience, and Felicia Atkinson composes. Yet, both often mediate their work with film or a tandem art piece. The juxtaposition of whispers against vibraphone, of drone against eerie scratchy buzzing, all clanged with ominous gong tolls and whale wails cemented an unfamiliar feeling of dread-peace-creepy-soft-soothe.
This song, creates a wicked feeling that lends to its motif of protecting the ocean. The aforementioned feeling of dread-peace, which is too long to repeat, feels similar to the uncertainty and fear that surrounds us when thinking about our foreboding future: the tension of the seemingly invincibility of the ocean’s magnificence and its impending downfall.