The featured artist category takes a closer look at one of the artists in Jukebox Heart. We kick off this new category featuring the artist known as Colleen.
Parisian sound sculptress Colleen’s music is more atmospheric than a room full of nervous ghosts. Her liking for 17th Century instruments is obvious and itself fascnating. Whether it’s the viola da gamba (a 7-string ancestor of the cello), the spinet (a variation of the harpsichord), the clarinet, crystal glasses, the guitar, or simply a sample, Colleen’s creations have always used the lush, mesmeric qualities of a bygone era to evoke the atmospheric gloom of the ethereal music she makes today.
It seems a shame to tarnish the delicate perfection of Colleen’s music with words – this is music that needs to be listened to late at night, free of everyday distractions. You’ll find yourself entranced by a mesmerising spider’s web of sounds that sound like they’ve been beamed in from another place, another time.
Colleen’s simple but effortlessly charming music is an entrancing potion laced with magical details – naïve instrumentals filled with warmth, melody and soul, played on a broken music box, a glockenspiel or a guitar, phasing in and out, on the verge of collapse. Above all, this is wonderfully human. Another girl, another planet.
This track is called “Ritournelle”
Everyone Alive Wants Answers is the haunting 2003 debut full-length of work of then-26-year-old Parisienne Cecile Schott. No more tangible thoughts were conjured from the stark jumble of digital mandolins that stumble so meticulously throughout the title track of this album than a walk through a park where you can almost hear eeryone else’s thoughts. Colleen has surveyed the landscapes of organic music made digitally and done it more successfully than most, given the immediate grandeur and impact of Everyone Alive Wants Answers. ‘Ritournelle’ plays like a ballroom dance scene in a Tim Burton movie, all delicate chimes and sweeping strings. This full-length debut is absolutely gorgeous, a warm inviting swirl of ambient symphonics and contemplative interludes. It’s an amazing thing to spring this CD on someone when traveling late at night alone through country roads…
This track is called “Summer Water”
To describe the ten hand-crafted compositions that comprise The Golden Morning Breaks as minimalist psychedelia would be both an oversimplification of the genres and a disservice to the musings Colleen, whose complex combinations of melodic guitar, glockenspiel, keyboards and found sounds recall neither John Cale nor the 13th Floor Elevators. Still, her second album for the Leaf label, bounds forth in both directions with equal aplomb, resulting in a sound that is at turns disturbing, humorous, playful and dreamlike – simultaneously seductive and reductive.
Even a cursory listening to this all-instrumental offering reveals a number of intriguing influences. ‘Floating in the Clearest Night’ and ‘The Happy Sea’ share not only a disposition for precious song titles, but also a common musical vernacular with Flying Saucer Attack and the occasional Bardo Pond record. Truly, a number of the songs on The Golden Morning Breaks seem to have been recorded with a barely-melodic vocal track in mind, only to have it removed at the last moment. The absence of lyrics, though, is scarcely a fault, exemplified best by ‘I’ll Read You a Story’ – seven minutes of fleeting, plucked melodies that unfold and develop just like the title implies.
In contrast to the Bliss-Out tendencies on a number of tracks lies the more-playful, if occasionally less-fulfilling, psychedelic tinge of compositions like ‘The Sweet Harmonicon’ and ‘Mining in the Rain.’ Certainly rooted in the same percussive territory as other songs found here, and bearing a marked similarity to recordings by Pipa-ist Min Xiao Fen, these songs sound not as much like self-contained compositions as lost fragments from a Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd album. Undeniably intriguing, if occasionally precious, Schott’s gift for controlled improvisation makes these songs tenable interludes in an otherwise thoroughly-engaging album. Underscoring this point, perhaps intentionally, is the remarkable 10-minute closing track ‘Everything Lay Still,”’ which combines playful chimes, droning guitar and keyboards into a single magnificent theme that displays at once both sides of Colleen’s dual nature.
This track is called “What is a Componium, Part 2”
‘It seemed like a dream opportunity to explore further the miniature continent of sound that music boxes in all their variety generate,’ says Colleen’s Cécile Schott in response to the carte blanche handed to her by national radio station France Culture’s Atelier De Création Radiophonique to record music for a special broadcast. The commission would have remained just that, but Schott was so pleased with the results she decided to give the nod for the recordings to be released on this 38-minute EP, under a temporarily revised artist name.
No stranger to the use of music boxes in her recordings and live performance, the consciously limited palette yields extraordinary dividends; this is arguably the most intimate and wonderfully melodic release of her career to date. Composed entirely using music boxes (but for one track), the pieces use everything from miniature boxes hidden in 1940s birthday cards to large Victorian boxes. Not content with the orthodox sounds produced by the boxes, Schott hijacked them, playing them with her fingers or with mallets on the comb. She re-sampled and affected pitch and delay in a quest to produce unique sounds and melodies.
Utilizing the natural loop in each box, the different boxes move in and out of time, evoking memories of childhood. This playful nature ebbs and flows throughout the EP like a stream unsure of its chosen path. Sounds reminiscent of harps (‘What Is A Componium? Part 2’), xylophones and Fender Rhodes (‘Your Heart Is So Loud’), and electronics (‘Calypso In A Box’) appear and then disappear on the landscape, fooling the listener into believing that the noises emanate from more than one type of instrument.
This track is called “Sea of Tranquility”
On her album ‘Les Ondes Silencieuses’, Parisienne sonic sculptress Cecille Schott aka Colleen has abandoned the samples and loops which characterised her previous long players, preferring instead to employ natural sounds and tones. But, ever inventive, this approach led to the 26-year-old Parisienne using Baroque instruments such as the viola da gamba and the spinet, a smaller relative of the harpsichord. The end result is a shimmering, evocative collection of homespun, frequently fragile musical moods which showcase Cecille’s considerable compositional talents. She also recently scored ‘Serie’ – the last dance work by the acclaimed French-Swiss choreographer Perrine Valli and has completed a successful UK tour with her label mates Triosk.