Annie A – The Wind That Had Not Touched Land

Label: A Colourful Storm – acolour052
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album
Country: Australia
Released: 25 Apr 2025
Genre: Electronic, Non-Music
Style: Ambient, Experimental, Field Recording, Poetry, Spoken Word, Drone, Electroacoustic

For one night only, A Colourful Storm arrange new experimental supergroup Annie A, consisting of French artist Félicia Atkinson, poet Christina Petrie, New Zealand singer songwriter Maxine Funke and our good friends Jack Rollo & Elaine Tierney better known as Time Is Away.

It’s a meditative and delicate collaboration with each artist playing to their strengths.  Atkinson’s gossamer sonic landscapes are detailed yet empty and evocative, the prime bedrock for Petrie’s considered wordplay, whilst Time Is Away employ their intricate and sympathetic arrangement skills (garnered through 10 years plus of their cult radio shows and mixtapes with us no less) in allowing each element the room to breathe.  Funke joins in at the end with a typically homey and intimate piece of folk music that rounds off a sublime suite of deep, focused and subtly conceptualised listening.  One to really sink yourself into.  (Mint / New)  

At the end of my arm
A finger, a thread, a vanishing point
Where nothing can be seen and the air is moving

Annie A, the one-off collaborative project between Félicia Atkinson, Time is Away’s Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney, Christina Petrie and Maxine Funke, arrives on A Colourful Storm with a profoundly inquisitive, exploratory composition evoking questions of inconstancy and reconciliation, vastness and finitude, and the sometimes cruel deception of human perception. Who will conduct our dreams if we never wake?

Annie A quietly observes and attempts to compartmentalise the answers. A geographically diverse yet determinedly like-minded ensemble, its seeds were sown during a spring night in London, where time on stage was shared and cherished by Atkinson, Time is Away and Petrie after years of mutual appreciation. Atkinson had found solace in Time is Away’s Ballads, Funke’s Seance and particularly the voice of poet and performer Petrie, whose remarkable delivery, first heard on Ballads, here drifts effortlessly from a wide-eyed stream of consciousness to crystalline sensory expression: “The wind is full of creases / It is shaking the weak threads in the cliff / The coast is releasing teeth and nails into the air”. It is the perfect accompaniment to Atkinson’s hushed tones - a sometimes textural, if not spectral, presence - spoken sensitively like a mother to a resting child, reflecting upon the forces of nature, the fragility of ecology and the surrendering of self to air, rain, and earth.

Devotees of Atkinson’s practice will recognise the significance of the natural world in her work, her evocative sonic landscapes formed from a toolbox of keyboard, voice and materials collected from everyday life on the dramatic rocky coast of Normandy, as well as field recordings from places far and wide. She breathes life into liminal spaces, the sound of wind, whispers and the distant clatter of rocks conjuring visions of places both beautiful and eerily familiar. Petrie wanders curiously in these places. “First the Crocus” introduces her desirous cries above a wistful electronic signal, the alternation with Atkinson’s whispers suggestive of each other’s distant presence. “The wind that had not touched land, moving with the warm gyre of the sea / Is now touching land / And is beginning to draw the dust”. What is her fate when this wind touches land? The meeting of the other, the crossing of paths. Their voices, layered and dreamlike, drift and entrance each other with gossamer intensity.

Interpreting and arranging the field of sonic accoutrements is Time is Away, whose weaving, layering and sensitivity to detail is likened to the meticulous assembly of an Anni Albers textile. The spirit of Albers guides the piece’s entirety, Petrie’s recounting of her loom and thread a symbol of endurance, vitality and seeking wonder in intricacies: “Every thread needs to pass through the eye of a needle before you begin / I keep wondering, I just keep wondering what will happen”. The piece concludes with a timely appearance by Funke, whose meditation on vulnerability confronts and surrenders herself to the enchanting natural world.

Tracklist
A1        First The Crocus 4:36
A2        The Wind That Had Not Touched Land 7:23
A3        For Annie Albers 4:43
A4        Aria 3:06
B1        Like A Sail Or A Bed 5:25
B2        Chaque Plante, Chaque Personne 3:47
B3        The Air Moving 6:15
B4        Nasturtium Runners (Read By The Rain) 4:12