Felicia Atkinson

Félicia Atkinson, a visual artist and experimental musician of remarkable output, makes her home in the French Alps. Her primarily improvised work moves between fragmented electro-acoustic folk and extended drones, frequently weaving in whispered vocals or poetry together with field recordings and distortion.

She entered the world in Paris in 1981, graduated with honors from l'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, and took part in the contemporary dance project BOCAL. Performances began in 2004; music releases followed in 2007 as half of Stretchandrelax alongside Elise Ladoué, whom she had met through BOCAL.

After issuing Roman Anglais with Sylvain Chauveau on O Rosa Records in 2008, she delivered her first solo album, the abstract folk CD La La La, on the Japanese label Spekk later that year. A partnership with Nicolas Jorio under the name Louisville produced A Silent Effort in the Night in 2009. Around the same time she began issuing books of drawings, later expanding into volumes of poetry and novels.

Kaugummi, the French publishing company, released her second solo album, Lakes and Losses, in early 2010. Later that year she adopted the name Je Suis le Petit Chevalier for stranger, more psychedelic material. After several limited cassettes and CD-Rs on labels such as Ruralfaune and Digitalis, Aguirre Records brought out the project’s vinyl debut, L'Enfant Sauvage, in 2011. Additional solo releases that year included The Driver on Hibernate and O-RE-GON on Home Normal.

In 2012 she co-founded Shelter Press with Bartolomé Sanson, an enterprise that issues music alongside books and zines. Je Suis le Petit Chevalier’s An Age of Wonder, a co-release with La Station Radar, ranked among the label’s earliest titles. Cassettes and vinyl continued to appear under both names throughout 2013, yet Atkinson formally announced the end of Je Suis le Petit Chevalier in 2014. That same year she and Brian Pyle of Ensemble Economique released the techno album Naked Island on Peak Oil.

The solo album A Readymade Ceremony appeared in 2015, as did a full-length collaboration with Peter Broderick under the name La Nuit, titled Desert Television. Comme un Seul Narcisse, a joint project with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, followed in 2016, succeeded by the solo album Hand in Hand in 2017.