colleen

HEAD FULL OF ECHOES… CLOSING THE CIRCLE OF THE TUNNEL AND THE CLEARING WITH MY FAVORITE STILLS FROM THE DOCUMENTARY.
I have always wanted to share more stills from @luistorroja ‘s documentary and somehow never got round to it, and now that the doc is 1 year old and that I’m deep into recording my 8th album Le jour et la nuit du réel, it feels appropriate to close the circle of that particular album (even though I will still play it live).
I love how Luis managed to visually translate the intimate nature of the relationship I ended up developing with my machines over the course of making The Tunnel and the Clearing. I can’t really think of a more truthful portrait of me than a superposition of my face with a tape loop repeating sounds, because for better and for worse, that’s more or less how my brain and my whole self have always worked with thoughts (I find it revelatory that tape is recorded, played and erased by “heads”). And I do feel that my instruments are like friends and bandmates, that I’m not actually alone making music in the studio, but rather am accompanied by them, their special beauty as well as their quirks and occasional failures.

When Moog agreed to premiere the documentary on The Tunnel and the Clearing last year, they also asked me to make a short tutorial to show how I used the Grandmother to process the Reface YC on my album The Tunnel and the Clearing. 
I made 2 videos for the 2 songs that use that method, “Revelation” (previously posted here) and “Hidden in the Current”.  The voiceover tutorial is up on Moog’s Youtube channel, and is featured with a patch sheet as part of the written interview I gave on their website. I love seeing the overhead shot video without the voiceover though, and listening to this more than a year later, I’m actually floored by how similar this sounds to the album version (headphones for bass content please), which shouldn’t surprise me given that my methodology was indeed to record live and not use any plug-in, but still…
I hadn’t really dug deep into synthesis at that point, and now that I’m 1 year deep into exploring the Grandmother, I would say that even though the limit of this approach is that you *have* to be in drone mode for it to work (to process the external sound source via the synth’s mono input), it does open the beautiful possibility of having a chord-capable instrument (Reface YC here) on top of the monophonic synth, which immediately takes into another territory. I am really taken by the “washes” of sound on this song, as I am by the textures I got on “Revelation” without even using the oscillators and basically just using the Grandmother as if it were an LFO/Lowpass Filter/Spring Reverb giant unit.
I also remain a massive fan of manipulating parameters rhythmically by hand, both for the sonic result and for the sheer joy of doing it. There will be plenty more of this in LP8 which I’m currently recording.
“Hidden in the Current” setup: 
Reface YC auxed to Grandmother
Grandmother auxed to MF-104M Analog Delay, with both outputs Mix and Delay to get a stereo effect.

Luis Torroja‘s mini-documentary on the making of my 7th album The Tunnel and the Clearing was premiered by Moog Music Inc. exactly 1 year ago!!! More about this this weekend, even though it’s old news, since many of you joined this space after that date, and since this was a special project born at a complicated moment. I am forever grateful to Luis for his amazing work and dedication, to Moog for their heart-warming support, with special thanks to Jason Daniello at Moog and Mike Boyd at Thrill Jockey.

I often mention that stone carving helped me get back to music-making after my late 2000s hiatus: this is the alabaster sculpture I worked on for 9 months during 2009-2010. It is the only real sculpture I’ve made apart from another tiny one, since the process is so time-consuming, but for me it will always stay as a testimony of a special moment in which I had to rethink my approach to my creative work. Thank you to my stone carving teacher Dominique Rivaux for this unique experience that brought me so much!!!

(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 ❤

… OR: I AM GLAD HUMAN BEINGS ARE CAPABLE OF MAKING THESE THINGS SO THAT I CAN USE THEM.
I have said this a few times already: I am by no means a nerd, I have no background in anything remotely resembling the set of skills needed to build a synthesizer, but I do believe in educating myself and in the power of just marvelling at beautiful, truly well-made things. I will always be in awe of the fact that it’s *people* who have thought out this wonderfully complex and novel way of making sound, and found the means to turn their ideas into a reality, which we lay people can subsequently use.

I loved visiting the Moog factory when I performed at the Moog Soundlab back in November 2017 (cf my A Flame Variations EP recorded over there, to mark the end of the production of Moogerfoogers), and some of that magic was recaptured last week when I visited Mas Acoustics, Moog’s distributor and repair partner in Spain, on the occasion of my Grandmother needing a revision for scratchy pots. Mas Acoustics happen to be located in a small town north of Barcelona, so this was just perfect, and I asked Juan Berlanga, in charge of repairing units, if he could leave my unit open: not only did we need to doublecheck the new pots worked fine, I also wanted to see if perhaps we could do something to the reverb tank as my way of playing can be quite percussive and I sometimes felt I was getting a bit too much spring sound (the tank was smaller than I thought, and in the end, we decided against doing anything to cushion it, for fear of killing a sound that works so well).

Even though my understanding of these boards is extremely partial, I’m happy I can recognize the basic parts, and I figured that those of you who actually understand this stuff would enjoy looking at the innards of this amazing synth, so here goes…

Tantas gracias a todo el equipo de @masacoustics, Juan Berlanga en particular por la reparación y el trato inmejorable, y Jana Moreno por las fotos 1-6! Also massive thanks to @moogsynthesizers for their amazing gear and support, Jason Daniello @orgatroid in particular and Jack Burton.