Intimacy has always been part of Félicia Atkinson’s work. Under her own name and as Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier, the French musician, painter, and writer makes sound art that consistently feels like the articulation of a single, inimitable brain. A Readymade Ceremony might be her most literally intimate effort to date. Often it sounds like she’s sitting right next to you, whispering into your ear with her hand cupped around it. The up-close effect of her voice is matched by her music, whose tones, drones, beats, and samples are so detailed, it’s as if you’re listening through a microscope.

That aura of privacy pervades the album so thoroughly that it seems inappropriate to focus on any individual track. But one piece does serve as the record’s center of gravity, a kind of album-in-miniature capturing the greatness of the whole. The 10-minute "L’Oeil" features Atkinson whispering words "extracted and derived" from the 1941 Georges Bataille short story "Madame Edwarda". Beneath her rolls a bed of wind, static, rumbles, and a plethora of other environment-building sounds.

There’s a tactile feel to that backing, but when placed behind Atkinson’s hypnosis-inducing vocals, it all feels like it’s happening subconsciously. Repeating simple phrases like "I used to be played more often" and "hanged by the shower curtain’s rod," her voice seems to comb across your skin, in a sort of avant-garde version of ASMR. But the point is less about inducing physical response—though "L’Oeil" is practically telepathic in that way—than about simultaneously engaging brain, heart, and gut. You feel it because you understand it and vice versa. The words Atkinson intones and the notes she summons are equal parts sound and sense, so the way she says something and what it means become inextricably linked.

The rest of A Readymade Ceremony extends that alchemy, always feeling both tactile and subliminal, literal and abstract. Atkinson’s past work often involved dense, sometimes obscuring layers of echoing sound. But here there’s a new sense of lucidity and spaciousness that feels refreshing, like a sun shining after fog has cleared. By bringing her sounds into sharper focus, Atkinson has sacrificed none of their depth—in fact, getting to see everything makes it more obvious how much is going on.

Despite the higher resolution, A Readymade Ceremony still feels and sounds like a dream. The logic of how she fuses sounds approaches a narrative, but it’s a surreal one—the kind that makes more sense while you’re entranced by it than when you try to explain it to someone later. That’s another quality that has persisted throughout her music, as well as in her flowing poems and naturalistic visual art. It seemed as if it might’ve reached its apex in her career-crowning 2013 double-album Voices/Visions. But it turns out that was just as much a launching point as a peak, and A Readymade Ceremony is another step up in her fascinating journey.