JOHN ATKINSON +
TALYA COOPER
Plains LP
available for purchase here
mastered by Andrew Weathers
limited to 100 copies
comes with a two-sided insert
includes a digital download of both Plains AND the original soundtrack to Two Plains & A Fancy—allowing you to enjoy both albums and appreciate their singularity and relationship to each other.
Florabelle invites you to spend some time with Plains, an immersive album inspired by the open skies of the West.
Two Plains & A Fancy, the third film by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn, was hailed by The New Yorker as “the most imaginative and visionary” Western of recent years and is now receiving a theatrical release. Central to the film’s atmosphere is its arid yet spacious score, a collaboration between Talya Cooper (previously of Household) and John Atkinson (of Aa), whose soundtrack for Asasin in Lege was the inaugural Florabelle release.
As an LP, Plains grows out of elements of the film’s original score, but it’s also very much its own thing—a quartet of glimmering, weightless pieces that, free from the need to score certain scenes of certain lengths, unfold and envelope at their own pace. Anchoring the album is the side-long “Chillien”, a delicate, harmonic bloom punctuated by the whirs and clicks of Cooper’s guitar and voice. Atkinson, taking control of the processed elements of composition, allows the b-side sequence to grow more expansive and dynamic with each track, maintains an unmistakably warm glow. This is ambient music with an appreciable sense of landscape and scale.
PRESS
“The A-side's “Chillien” is the album's peaceful centerpiece, a side-long foray into gently flickering drones whose bright glistenings at times suggest the sounds of a calliope. Accented by whirring guitar fragments and firefly-like punctuations, the setting advances at its own stately, slow-motion pace, indifferent to the chaotic tempo by which so much of the world operates. The music's effect is somewhat like a country pool whose placid surfaces are continuously disrupted by the rapid movements of water bugs.” — Textura
“Cooper’s guitar lightly punctures the soundscape while Atkinson takes on processing duties, allowing the music to shift and sway in the lightest of April winds. It blooms without any sharp edges, and all of the composition’s elements are brought into one…this is wide-open music…a record of exploratory beauty.” — Fluid Radio
“The music here is so calming and universal that it feels free of obvious influence, more like a timeless process of nature…a luminous ambient formation, shimmery and deep.” — Yellow Green Red