Saturday, November 15, 2025 at 8:00 PM to 11:30 PM
2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles
**Black Editions Presents** french electro-acoustic composer **Félicia Atkinson** and celtic experimentalist and master of the Scottish smallpipes **Brìghde Chaimbeul** for an evening of music traversing uncharted sonic territories. For **Félicia Atkinson**, human voices inhabit an ecology alongside and within many other things that don’t speak, in the conventional sense: landscapes, images, books, memories, ideas. The french electro-acoustic composer and visual artist makes music that animates these other possible voices in conversation with her own, collaging field recording, midi instrumentation, and snippets of essayistic language in both french and english. Her own voice, always shifting to make space, might whisper from the corner or assume another character’s tone. Atkinson uses composing as a way to process imaginative and creative life, frequently engaging with the work of visual artists, filmmakers, and novelists. Her layered compositions tell stories that alternately stretch and fold time and place, stories in which she is the narrator but not the protagonist. Atkinson lives on the wild coast of Normandy and has played music since the early 2000s. She has released many records and a novel on **Shelter Press**, the label and publisher she co-runs with Bartolomé Sanson. **Brìghde Chaimbeul** is a leading purveyor of celtic experimentalism and a master of the Scottish smallpipes – the bellows-blown, mellower and more emotive cousin to the famous Highland bagpipes – and she’s taken them to the global stage. A native Gaelic speaker from the Isle of Skye, Brìghde roots her music in her language and culture. She rose to prominence as a prodigy of traditional music, but has since begun a journey to take the smallpipes into uncharted territory. She has devised a completely unique way of arranging for pipe music that emphasises the rich textural drones of the instrument; the constancy of sound that creates a trance-like atmosphere, played with enticing virtuosic liquidity. She draws inspiration from the world of interconnected piping traditions, and her most recent album brings in influence from ambient, avant garde and electronic music. One can talk about Brìghde’s awards (BBC Young Folk Award; BBC Horizons Award; SAY Award nominee) and her wide array of collaborators (Caroline Polachek; Colin Stetson; Gruff Rhys; Aidan O'Rourke...) but after it all, her music speaks for itself. Haunting, entrancing, breathtaking, beautiful – this open-eared, understatedly virtuosic performer is transforming and creating new definitions for Scottish folk in the 21st century.