colleen

(written on 1st August 2022)

When I was a child, there was a lamp clamped to my desk, one of those heavy articulated lamps with a spring on the side. This spring was the first thing I tried to make sound with, running my nail along it. I thought about this today, as I am about to finally embark on recording my 8th album. The older I get, the more exhausted I am by life’s complications (I know, it doesn’t sound optimistic, and it isn’t), and the more exhausted I am, the more I want my music to be the ultimate refuge against this, a place and moment where complexity is only in the music itself. Closely intertwined with this desire is a growing and almost gut-like instinct to simplify my means of production, which I feel is actually the only way I can tap into complexity in contents and form.

I started working on this album exactly one year ago, and I rapidly saw that it would be a kind of octopus-like creature. At the beginning several approaches competed for my attention: a couple of songs with singing that felt related to my last album The Tunnel and the Clearing in both sound and construction; sketches with the Elka Drummer One (I’ve been wanting to make a rhythm-focused album since 2018…); a renewed interest in the idea of a “suite” of compositions, possibly influenced by reading a massive history of Western music, and… SYNTHESIS, on the @moogsynthesizers Grandmother, overtaking my creative life in a way I hadn’t expected. What you nurture grows, and little by little the suite-like approach and the idea of synthesis variations overtook the other aspects, to the point where I feel some radical pruning of the other aspects is almost bound to happen.

I have finally managed to put together a list of the songs I am going to record – everything live, no edits. It looks pretty insane on paper, but I will probably fuse some of those variations, leading to fewer tracks. Synthesis is a lot of fun, and whenever something is really fun, you run the risk of not really hearing the music behind your fun, so to help with critical hearing, I have made a “synthesis table” to keep objective track of what I do.
Can’t wait for it to be in your ears ❤

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