colleen

I am super happy to announce that I will be playing@kingsplacelondon , London, on 19th March 2022 TICKETS HERE. This show was initially planned for August 27th and had to be postponed due to the 10-day quarantine rule. I will also play in my adopted hometown of Barcelona on 12th March at one of the best sounding venues I’ve ever had the chance to visit @elpumarejo with @furvoice opening and organizing @mutabor_music.
There is a silver lining to every cloud: the London show postponement not only enabled me to think about and prepare for this show differently, but also go back on my decision to stop live playing, which I had announced– after much hesitation – back in May. I feel the need to announce this already so that none of you decide to do some crazy travelling thinking that this is your last opportunity to see me live. I will write some more about this – it is a subject that has many ramifications for me. For now, all I can say is: I will play more shows, though for sure nothing will happen Stateside until 2023, because of the current visa situation in US embassies.
Regarding these two shows, I am overjoyed that I will get to play not one but two albums for you: I took up my treble viola da gamba, more or less to dust it off rather than with any intention to truly play it, a couple of months ago, and to my surprise realized my playing wasn’t as rusty as I thought, that I could still handle all the foot sampling operation needed to play Captain of None live (I last performed it @moogfest in spring 2017), and – most importantly – that I still absolutely loved playing that album. I really needed to recover brain bandwidth to truly believe that I could handle playing two albums that are totally different in terms of instrumentation and set up, and therefore require a lot of concentration and brain power, and paradoxically, it was my decision to stop playing live and the relief and relaxation it brought that enabled this.

It’s the first time I’m recording an album so soon after completing the previous one (I finished The Tunnel and the Clearing on 1st December 2020) and it is so exciting to be riding a creative wave stronger than any I’ve known so far. The way I’m feeling right now is that I have the enthusiasm of a 15-year-old coupled with the experience of a 45-year-old: it is not something I expected to feel at any point in my life, and I can’t quite believe it’s happening right now, but it is. Recently rehearsing Captain of None also gave me a nice sense of continuity. And it helps that I live in a vibrant city ❤️

Earlier this week I reorganized my studio to accommodate the Grandmother-and-Fooger-centric workflow I’m digging deeply into right now: I wasn’t expecting to go down that particular rabbithole for LP8 but I am 100% in love with what I’m finding out every single day through patient studying and experimenting. I also love Sol’s face as he discovered the new setup! The orange hue is not a filter by the way, it’s the color of the studio’s overhead lightbulb :-)))

As usual when I start work on a new album, things don’t exactly go the way I have planned them, and this is usually in the best possible way. I thought I would dive straight into an Elka Drummer One + Space Echo extravaganza (and I *will*, at some point), but because the Space Echo had to travel to the UK for a revision with Soundgas (it’s on its way back), I ended up focusing on the other side of the album’s sonic equation: the Grandmother and the Moogerfoogers. I thought I would keep on feeding my Yamaha Reface YC into the Grandmother for processing, since I was so happy with the results on “Revelation” and “Hidden in the Current” on the last album, and indeed I even made a complete song with that setup, but… but… I started using the Grandmother as what it really is, a synth, and it’s official: I have totally gone down the synthesis rabbithole.

When combined with the Moogerfoogers, the possibilities just seem endless, and that’s even before any patching happens… I am also so happy I’m finally having a proper go at the Moogerfoogers I was so kindly gifted with by Moog after my 2017 Moog Soundlab session: I worked a lot with the MF-104M delay from 2014 onwards, and the MIDIMuRF played a huge part in 2017’s A Flame my Love, a Frequency, but I only used the Lowpass Filter once on the last album (“Implosion-Explosion”), and I had yet to use the Ring Modulator and 12-Stage Phaser. Now is the perfect time to finally honor that gift.

As I go through this crucial learning and research phase, there is also a voice at the back of my head that says “But these aren’t your songs yet”. It also says “These aren’t even songs yet”. And that voice is always right. Because one thing’s clear to me: I am primarily a song-maker, and I personally am convinced of the fact that it is up to each individual creator to try and offer something unique and personal before putting it out on a totally saturated market. In other words: I don’t think you should listen to me unless I have something that only I can say. So I am excited at the thought that pretty soon the next phase of LP8 will naturally start to unfold, one in which life itself begins to seep into the machines to dictate what sound transformed into songs will sound like.