Félicia Atkinson: SANS VISAGE Album Review

Félicia Atkinson’s sound collages—ever-expanding webs of electronics, field recordings, spoken word, and piano—seem to haunt the spaces they occupy, draping themselves in every corner like an otherworldly presence. With SANS VISAGE, the French composer’s new score for Georges Franju’s 1960 film Les yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face), she leans into her music’s ghostliness, using delicate layers of airy electronics to conjure the film’s looming dread and pairing contrasting textures to meditate on the invisible and visible bars that trap us.

The Belgian cultural center Viernulvier approached Atkinson to create the score as part of its Videodroom series; the recorded version pares the full 90-minute score down to a 34-minute release. SANS VISAGE accompanies the story of Christiane, whose father becomes obsessed with finding a new face to graft onto hers after a tragic car accident. She walks the halls of his home behind a plaster mask, and he desperately experiments on a mounting number of imprisoned patients; by the end, Christiane finds her own sort of freedom, though it is not without the memory of the horrors she endured.

Atkinson’s score, dedicated to French rape survivor Gisèle Pelicot, explores the film’s themes using music that feels both like a cage and an escape. To make this music, Atkinson sculpted Fender Rhodes piano and electronics melodies in a process akin to early musique concrète, a technique in which composers took fragments of magnetic tape and spliced them together. Atkinson similarly makes collages, carefully weaving each phrase into the next to create unsettled atmospheres. She often stitches creeping silence and razor-sharp squeals together, showing how thin the line can be between freedom and confinement.

Though much of the album presents wispy vignettes, the best tracks have clear direction. “Sans Visage I” has distinct forward motion, beginning with a series of sharp pitches and a muted scream. Later, piano slices through the fog with a supernatural three-note lullaby that springs just off the beat, racing forward through the song’s misty backdrop. As the melody repeats, more pitches nervously emerge, and the resulting melodies freefall into the next two tracks, during which the piano turns into a full-blown scream. The pace picks up; the phrases become increasingly frenzied—it creates the feeling of fleeing, or of a long-awaited release. Other tracks offer less clarity and ultimately become stuck, like “Les Yeux VI,” which creates an ominous atmosphere, but brews from miles away rather than evoking a mysterious entity present in the room with us.

But sometimes, hushed moments become the score’s most powerful statement. “Les Yeux IV” combines beating electronics with orb-like pitches, taking ample silence between each entrance, while “Sans Visage V” ends the album with rippling piano melodies that take their time to unfold, pausing for breaths, then culminating in resolution. Silence is often a horror film’s most frightening weapon: It can be filled with anything, and offers a reminder of all that lies beyond our comprehension. In the eeriness of quietude and gossamer sound, Atkinson invites us to stew, and then break free.

Félicia Atkinson: Sans Visage