colleen

I’ll be posting every day this week to finish this series this weekend, because next week will be full of very very exciting news regarding the new record!

Around 2001, I was given the Acid software by a friend, and I discovered sampling on the computer:  I could finally make my dream of making solo music beyond the confines of my guitar-based practice come true, and obsessively borrowed dozens of CDs of all music genres every week in the mediatheques of Paris, the city where I had moved in 1999 to take a master’s in English. My voracious appetite for all the types of  music to which access had so far been denied to me because of my lack of money led me to this sample-based approach in a very natural way. In 2002 I finished what became my first album, Everyone alive wants answers, but interestingly enough, there is *one* track on the album that does contain music played by myself, and the instrument is… that same Bontempi organ mentioned in Parts 1 and 2!

The original instrument was recorded right after the one I posted a couple of days ago, and even though I initially preferred the very first song, it is the second organ song that ended up on the album, and I’m intrigued by the fact that of all the old recordings I could have used, the Bontempi organ came out the winner: I think it’s because somehow it already seemed ready to blend within the acoustic-meets-electronic-manipulation that I was aiming for with my sampling approach (almost all the samples were of acoustic instruments). As for the “swimming pool down the railway track”, it really did exist, and I saw it on my way to work every day as I went to teach English in a lycée in a Parisian suburb, its slight surrealism in the morning light making the early rising and long transport hours somehow more bearable.

The album has been reissued on coloured and black vinyl by The Leaf Label and on tape by Beacon Sound, head over to Bandcamp if you are curious!

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