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Doors 7pm / Show 8pm
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In a mid-renovation performance within The Lab’s cavernous space, before permanence sets in, we invite you to experience work by Félicia Atkinson and Jon Porras.
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.
For many years, Atkinson has co-run Shelter Press with her partner and collaborator Bartholome Sanson, an artist-run imprint that publishes records, interviews, essays, and art books from a wide network of international collaborators. This ethos — artist-run, artist-built — is a cornerstone of The Lab’s programming around the compost pile extending through 2028. She visits The Lab first to perform work from her recent release Space as an instrument.
Jon Porras (Barn Owl) creates drone music with a refined sense of atmosphere and remarkable forward motion. Regardless of the tools he uses, be it guitars and stacks of amplifiers or modular synthesizers, Porras creates cavernous sound-worlds that are as inviting as they are alien.
Jon Porras possesses a rare acuity for locating the pulse of a sonic landscape and carving out its emotional core. His work has long drawn from the friction of organic forms and electronic processing, but Achlys finds him moving further into texture, erosion, and weight. This is music steeped in collapse—not as spectacle, but as slow process. These pieces do not unfold, they gather. Guitar, sub-bass, modular synthesis, and processed noise accumulate like sediment, layering into compositions that move more like weather systems than traditional songs.
The Lab’s programming from 2025-28 uses the compost pile as a model to think with. The compost pile as a mechanism and site necessitates a diversity of roles and processes—human and non-human, living and non-living—and its success hinges on mutual interdependence. The first season of programming, titled the wet and the dry (2025-26) for the (de)compositional makeup of organic materials in healthy compost, explores the broad themes of ecological and interspecies collaboration and exchange through a vital materialism. In following years, we will trace this line of inquiry through an exploration of archival renewal and regeneration titled turning the heap (2026-27) and an envisioning of new, collaborative models for arts ecosystems in the mycelial web (2027-28).
Thank you to Teiger Foundation for their support of this project through their special initiatives grantmaking.
