colleen

For many years, my third album was the only album of mine from which I felt a disconnect. I have now come to accept it as it is, imperfect *and* the most perfect example of how each one of my albums is a snapshot of who I am as a person and as a musician at a given point in time and space – including my own limitations and stubborn way of thinking (at least back then) that I could do anything I set my heart on.

So here I am in 2006, 30 years old, in Paris, with a sabbatical from my teaching job granted at the last minute. The plan is to take advantage of this year to make music and tour. In November I go on a life-changing tour of Japan organized by Windbell, the label that we’ve just licensed my albums to, whose owner, Kazuki Tomita, had a dream (literally: in his sleep) that folk legend Bridget St John and I were touring Japan. He wrote to us and we both said yes. This is not the place to go on about why that trip to Japan was so inspiring, but my obsession with traditional Japanese aesthetics is all over this record and you can hear it.

2006 was also the year I made an old dream come true: playing the viola da gamba. I had seen the film “Tous les matins du monde” on TV when I was 15, had fallen in love with the sound of the viola, but I am not from a musical family and there is absolutely no way my parents could have afforded a viola or the lessons (and in a small French town in the 90s there would have been none anyway). Building up an instrument collection allowed me little by little to let go of self-imposed limitations: what was *materially* preventing me from playing the viola da gamba now that I was financially self-sufficient? Only the belief that I wasn’t supposed to. I found an incredible and forward-thinking luthier, the late François Danger of Atelier des 7 Cordes, commissioned a bass viola, and 9 months later, received it and started taking lessons with Florence Bolton, a Baroque music viola player who was open-minded enough to see past my nearly complete lack of reading skills.

It was pretty insane on my part to compose and record an album on a baroque instrument I barely mastered…

TIME TO UPGRADE AND LEARN
It was pretty obvious that the DIY approach of The Golden Morning Breaks was not going to cut it for a record which had at its core the idea of showcasing the bare beauty of the acoustic sound of the viola da gamba and other acoustic instruments. Yet I was not prepared for how utterly disastrous and literally *unusable* my first recordings were.My heart sank at the implications of my lack of proper microphones and engineering knowledge.
My mastering engineer Emiliano Flores @submerci stepped in and saved the day: he offered to record the songs that were most minimal and composed in the attic of his parents’ house in the Paris suburb of Villejuif, and to lend me a mike and preamp so that I could record the parts involving more layering and/or improvisation in my living room in Paris, the idea being that I would observe him closely on the job and ask for further advice once set up at home.

I remember the recordings happening over a couple of weeks in the attic, around December 2006/January 2007.
Guitar and clarinet: Beyer M160 ribbon on clarinet + guitar on “Sun against my eyes” (3), Beyer MC834 cardioid condenser on guitar on “Sea of tranquillity” (7).
Bass viola da gamba:  “Les ondes silencieuses” (4), “Le bateau”(9)  and the finger-picked part of “Blue Sands” (5), stereo take with Beyer M260 ribbon and Beyer MC834; AKG C460B pencil condenser for harmonics on “Blue Sands” (5).

I then recorded in my living-room on the Beyer MC834:
Bass viola on “This Place in time” (1), “Past the long black land” (8) and percussive part of “Blue Sands” (5) with mallets.
Spinet (a small harpsichord – see photo –borrowed from a Baroque music player) on “Le labyrinthe” (2)
Three water-filled crystal glasses (not pictured – given away on my last move) on “Echoes and coral”(6).
Emiliano and I then mixed and produced the album together (the only album of mine I did not work on alone), using some amazing Altiverb convolution reverbs as the sole effect.

Thank you so much Emiliano @submerci for stepping in so generously and passing on your knowledge at such a crucial moment.

PS: Emiliano’s comment on Instagram: “For any techie reading this I want to add that the Beyer M260 had been previously re-ribboned by Stephen Sank using RCA ribbon. The preamps used at my place were modded Symetrix SX-202 and AEA TRP.”

FINAL POST TOMORROW 😀

LES ONDES SILENCIEUSES: INSPIRATION AND THE END OF A CYCLE.
Les ondes was the end of a creative as well as life cycle for me: I had done 3 albums in less than 5 years (plus the music box EP) and quit my teaching job in June 2007, while already approaching burnout on the creative and music business front.
I still think I was totally meant to turn this dream of using Baroque instruments into a reality, but on the more minimal songs my basic playing skills on the viol made the end result less accomplished than the ideal “sonic picture” in my head. Also, without realizing it, by becoming obsessed with a certain purity of approach, I ended up in a creative cul de sac, from which I emerged only 6 years later.

1 Live setup: Chapelle Boondael, Brussels, Belgium, 19 May 2007 📷 Pascal Vermeulen

2 The viol: my luthier François Danger of Atelier des 7 Cordes passed away prematurely in 2019. He built both my bass viol and the treble one used on The Weighing of the Heart and Captain of None. I am convinced that the quality of his instruments made my unusual approach possible.

3 Original at the Met: 7-string model by Nicolas Bertrand, 1720. Contemporary viols are most often copies of historical models. All have gut strings and gut frets, and the 7th string was a French specificity.

Inspiration: the working title of “Blue sands” was “Jazz baroque africain” and indeed…
4 “Tous les matins du monde” OST: Jordi Savall’s interpretations of Marin Marais are still one of the best gateways into the magnificent soundworld of this instrument.

5 String instrument traditions from the African continent – the guembri in Nass el Guiwan a perfect example.

6 Coltrane: his recordings, his double bass players, this biography.

7 “Serpentine”, 1 of 3 live recordings from the 2006 Japanese tour now available digitally (initially a bonus for the Japanese edition). I regret not giving this solo clarinet song a chance on the album.

8 Japanese tour organized by Kazuki Tomita of Windbell with Bridget St John

Two sonic objects at a temple in Ohara:
9 A suikinkutsu (“water koto cave”), 📷 Takuji Aoyagi/Kama Aina, November 2006

10 A lithophone

Hope you enjoyed this trip in space and time as much as I did!

I can’t seem to smile today as my thoughts are stuck on the passing away of Mimi Parker of Low. I knew her and Alan a little bit on a personal level, and had been listening to them since their first album in 1994. Over the past couple of years Alan asked me several times to open for whole European tours for them, which I had to turn down as I could not have coped physically or mentally with their intense schedule, but of course I always felt immensely honored that he did so, and it always felt surreal too. I finally said yes when he asked if I would open for the short run of shows they were supposed to have in Spain last week, since this was close geographically and only 3 shows.
There is no logic and no comfort anywhere in this kind of news. The only positive I can think of is that her voice, drumming and songwriting skills are forever embedded in the records – and that as an extra, the stellar performances they *always* gave will also stay in our memories. As a musician, their shows always made me feel like rushing home to get better at what I do.
This past couple of years, whenever I receive bad news and am reminded of the closeness of death and illness, I think of 2 things: the people I love and music-making – on the same level. I had a serious health scare earlier this spring and one of my first thoughts was “But I want to keep going with synthesis”. It almost shocked me to see that this had become such a priority for me on a global human level, not just a musical one.
I have been on holiday for 2 weeks now and was thinking of forcing myself to go on a creative break, since I’ve been making music almost non-stop for 2 years 1/2 now, but frankly, considering none of us know for how long we are on this earth, I feel the best use of my time is music-making.
For the 20th anniversary of my Colleen project I was planning on posting about each one of my albums in the runup to the end of the year, so I’ll start today in an in an effort to lift myself up, starting with my second album.

The Golden Morning Breaks, 2005, The Leaf Label, artwork and design Iker Spozio.

DIY was the name of the game for the making of my second album: almost nothing was recorded in a traditional manner, and in hindsight I think that contact miking in particular gives the album its distinctive sound. Possibly my favourite album of mine with Captain of None.
Recorded in my living room in the flat I had moved to in spring 2004, in Paris’s XV. Prior to that, my only experience of recording instruments had been on a Fostex 4-track-tape recorder around 1995-96.
By 2003 I had started to build a musical instrument collection, prompted both by my desire to play instruments live and by my obsession with instruments of all kinds, preferably acoustic, the weirder, older and rarer, the better. I finally had money of my own through my English teaching job, so could start said collection and buy looping pedals (Boss Loopstation RC20, Line 6 DL4) and delay pedal (Akai Headrush). I “sort of” taught myself to play the cello over the course of a few months.

1 Summer water: classical guitar, cello
2 Floating in the clearest night: guitar
3 The heart harmonicon: glass harmonicon belonging to and recorded by my friend John Cavanagh in Glasglow (19th century glass glockenspiel – see photo)
4 Sweet rolling: zither
5 The happy sea: toy synth (not pictured; Casio? bought at LIDL, given away), wooden recorder (live show pic 6 March 2003; thrown away due to stinking of mould from the severe dampness I had in my former studio in San Sebastián), glockenspiel
6: I’ll read you a story: music box (pressed against the guitar’s body, close to the contact mike), guitar
7 Bubbles which on the water swim: cello, guitar
8 Mining in the rain: toy gamelan, rain falling on the windowsill of my living room.
9 The golden morning breaks: ukulele
10 Everything lay still: windchimes, cello
Guitar, zither and ukulele recorded through contact mikes. Cello through Schertler pickup. SM57 for other instruments. Everything going through the RC20 used as a preamp of sorts.
Delay primarily Akai Headrush, with all other FX  being Acid built-in plugins.
Pedals daisychained into cheap Behringer mixing desk, into cheap M-Audio 2-input soundcard.
Edited on Acid DAW.

I was so busy last month trying to get the master of LP8 finished that I didn’t realize that on 22nd October, it was the 20th anniversary of my first ever Colleen release, the Babies 7’’ on Parisian label Active Suspension. By a beautiful coincidence, I approved LP8’s masters bang in the middle of the anniversary date!

On 23rd October 2002, I also played my first show as Colleen at the Batofar in Paris, one of my favourite venues at the time… I can’t seem to find photos of that first show, an Active Suspension showcase, a label I had discovered through my favorite radio programme at the time, Helter Skelter on Aligre FM (thank you Viviane Morisson!!!)

By then I was about to complete my first album Everyone Alive Wants Answers, which was 95% sample-based, but I had already decided that I did not want to use a computer on stage (have stuck to that decision ever since) and that I needed to play actual instruments, which is why I took out my electric guitar again (soon to be replaced by my classical guitar at the next show). I had bought my first Boss Loopstation by then and my first Line 6 DL4 (which I had first seen used by label mate My Jazzy Child – who played with me on a couple of songs on that show – on an organ + delay combo, a la Terry Riley).

This proved to be a multiple turning point:

1) I had an actual physical record available, which was unbelievable for someone who grew up in the 80s-early 90s and could only fantasize about such things.

2) I had taken this first step of playing my Colleen music publicly for an audience, and it confirmed what I had felt when I had played small shows with my noisy pop/rock group in my late teens: I really loved it

3) This was the start of my live practice influencing my album-making: I went back to instrument-playing even though the Colleen project really was born from sampling.

The 7’’ has long been sold out, but is available digitally on my Bandcamp and all platforms.

“Babies” was included on Everyone Alive and I will always regret not incorporating “Good morning sunshine” as it’s one of my favourites.