colleen

I have played live for nearly 24 years now, in all sorts of configurations, always with the common point that there has been no safety net: nothing is prerecorded, no gear has presets and I’m always alone on stage. 
Some concerts end up being particularly memorable from a personal and artistic point of view, and when this confluence happens, it is a minor miracle, renewed proof that all the effort needed to be on that stage is worth it: the rehearsing time, the travel, the logistics and administration, the “putting yourself out there” to keep existing as a musician both in recording and live (I am booking myself worldwide now, so I can see those last aspects from the inside exactly as they are).
As soon as I saw that Libres antes del final would be released in late March, I hoped for Rewire to be the place where I would premiere it, and I not only got to play it once, but twice.
9 days have passed since that first show in Concordia and the second one at Theater aan het Spui and I am still feeling high: one of the loveliest audiences ever (in general and in a festival context, and not just at my show: people were amazing at all the shows I attended), powerful and precise sound that gave a whole other dimension to the music, for the first show in Concordia a room just hot enough to make everyone loosen up and actually start DANCING (I could not believe it, a dream come true), and within me as I played both shows a growing sense that this album is a new beginning, that I get to reinvent myself as many times as I choose, no matter how old I am, and that the whole point of doing this is to just be at one with the music and the sound and the audience. 
Jan Rijk @dutchpix‘s photo at Theater aan het Spui captures exactly how happy I felt and I want to keep it as a memory of those precious 2 shows.
Thank you so much Bronne Keesmaat for giving me the opportunity to play at this astoundingly curated festival, everyone @rewirefestival for the top quality hospitality, the audience for being so into the music, the incredible musicians for the inspiration and Jan @dutchpix for his wonderful photo.

Dear everyone, I am back from Rewire where I had the time of my life, both on stage (it was seriously the happiest and most liberated I ever felt playing music live) and off the stage as an audience member.

Before I left, we had finally just published the full video from my MATRIARCH DEEP DIVE WORSKHOP at my beloved ELEVATOR SOUND EU in Barcelona, the modular shop that acts as a central hub for the modular community in Barcelona, and which has been very important in improving my own synthesis journey through the numerous events it hosts, and as I already said, preparing for this workshop was key to making progress on Libres antes del final.

Here is a short excerpt of the title song I put on my own Youtube Channel

And you can see the FULL VIDEO below, in Spanish but with English subtitles, which for the most part are correct haha.

I also had the pleasure of doing a DANCEABLE MIX for FOGGY HEX’s OUTSIDERS SHOW on KIOSK RADIO: LISTEN HERE!

Foggy Hex is headed by my dear friend Jorge Paez, who invited me several times on his former radio programmes on Dublab. They have organized wonderful shows in Barcelona over the past couple of years and are organizing my DOUBLE SHOW in Casa Montjuic and Laut in Barcelona next week, Sunday 26th April LINK TO EVENT AND TICKETS

Casa Montjuic, where I reamped the last album, is nearly sold out, and Jorge will open the evening with a DJ set, but tickets are still available for Laut, its sister venue and club next door, where I will play in the middle of the room and where the idea is to get us moving: when doors open, we will listen to the set I made for Foggy Hex’s Kiosk programme, while I set up my gear, I will then play the album and extra material, and Francisco Sosa, who is part of Barcelona Modular Society, will be closing the night at Laut with his exquisitely danceable modular set.

Here are some words I wrote about the mix, I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I did

“I composed the bulk of Libres antes del final from December 2024 to September 2025, corresponding exactly with a period of time during which I sought to move my body on a daily basis, mostly through activities that I had interrupted for more than 30 years such as swimming and table tennis, and through activities I had never practised, such as self-defense classes and dancing, and it is through the prism of this new love for – and freedom found in – dancing that I chose the tracks included in this mix, as they are some of the songs that made me move the most during that time of album-making.

Dancing somehow enabled me to connect all the dots at that point of my personal and musical evolution: I gained a more physical understanding of rhythm through finally letting my body connect with it, which was exactly what I needed to give a stronger sense of pulse to my own music, even without incorporating traditional drum machine sounds (the only rhythms you hear on the album are all synthesis-made). But I also crucially – for the first time in years – rediscovered the joy of truly focusing on listening to music, which I had somehow lost along the way, and those songs made for joyful solitary dancing sessions on the tatami floor in my flat or the community terrace where I live, once I checked no one was watching.

I hope that this selection will make you feel like losing yourself and connecting to the music through dancing too.”

Dear everyone

Things are speeding up at a rate I nearly can’t keep up with, but I do want to share it all with you :-))) There will be more from me this week, but for now let’s concentrate on something very dear to my heart: the live shows!

REWIRE LIVE PREMIERE OF LIBRES ANTES DEL FINAL THIS WEEK 11th and 12th APRIL
I am so grateful and excited to be playing the new album this Saturday (Concordia at 10h10pm) and Sunday (Theater aan het Spui -Zaal II at 5pm) at one of the very best European festivals, @rewirefestival (my 2nd time at the festival + I also played once at Prewire!).

MADRID DATE 20th JUNE AT INFINITO DELICIAS + PORTLAND ANNOUNCEMENT + MORE TICKET LINKS!
In other live news: I am delighted to announce a show in Madrid on 20th June at @infinitodelicias . Tickets not available yet, but at least you can write down the date!

We are also finally able to announce the venue for my Portland show on 7th June, presented by Beacon Sound: Friends of Noise at the Offbeat!

On 26th April, @casa.montjuic in Barcelona is close to being sold out, but you can still get tickets for the second show of that night at Laut @lautbarcelona next door, both presented by @foggyhexbcn .
Tickets for the @icalondon show with @katenvy on 10th June are now available.
Individual tickets (as opposed to festival passes) are now on sale too for my NYC show on 1st May at @publicrecordsnyc for @bangonacan Long Play festival.

ALL TICKETS AVAILABLE VIA MY SONGKICK or MY THRILL JOCKEY ARTIST PAGE

The new album is super challenging to play live because of the multitude of settings and patching I use on the @moogsynthesizers Matriarch, both within the songs themselves and and in the physical  transition from one song to the next. This makes it a really exciting endeavour mentally and physically, and I feel so connected to the material emotionally that I just can’t wait to  experience the physicality of hearing it with a live sound in a good room.
For the first time of my career, I am also having the luxury of not carrying gear: the Matriarch is so bulky and heavy that the decision kind of imposed itself, I just could not carry it myself, and for a variety of reasons also don’t want to go the route of having somebody travelling and doing it for me, so it will be rented or borrowed everywhere I’m playing on this tour. This comes with possible risks (if rented, a faulty Matriarch could always happen), but to be honest the prospect of travelling with just my patchsheets and cables makes me see this tour in a totally different light. If you have carried half of your weight in gear in airports around the world for more than 20 years, you’ll know what I mean.
I hope you have been enjoying the album and I hope to see you soon on this tour! 

My dad passed away yesterday morning. He died from the last stage of Alzheimer’s disease, a truly horrible death, even with palliative care, and nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.
I shortly debated internally on whether or not I should keep this private, but having to “celebrate” the release of my new album less than 48 hours after his last breath is just so surreal, and I think it would feel totally inauthentic to pretend this didn’t happen.
When I titled my album Libres antes del final (“free before the ending”), I was obviously thinking about death, the ultimate ending, and it is incredibly symbolic to me that my dad’s health, after so many years of living with the disease, should have deteriorated so brutally as to precipitate his ending now (if you are not familiar with Alzheimer’s: it does kill, despite a general public perception that somehow the disease is mostly about losing your memory of who your loved ones are – it is unfortunately so much more than that).
If anything, this event makes me want to live an even fuller life than before. I am going to do my best to promote this album properly (I will be at Café Comets in Paris tomorrow as planned, 6h30 pm, for the listening session and + Q and A + signing) and I am really looking forward to playing live. Thankfully I had already rehearsed properly for live shows, so now in the runup to the shows I am going to do my best to deal with the administrative tasks that have arisen out of my dad’s passing, while also trying to rest properly to retain the mental clarity I need to play this new material and travel and be ok physically.
Sadly the videos of me swimming in the sea and of the reamping in Casa Montjuic have been cancelled due to irreconcilable differences, and the album cover nearly got cancelled too, so somehow this album seems to have a difficult birth, but I am hopeful that from now it can start a more peaceful life.
I also realized during the Bandcamp Listening Party last Friday that a wrong version of “Antídoto”, the first single, had been up on Bandcamp for all those months (I made 2 versions of that song), so if you gave it listen on the platform, please listen again now that the correct version has been uploaded, and course, tomorrow the full album will finally be available everywhere.
As always, thank you so much.

MIX FOR BBC 6 MUSIC: DREAMTIME WITH ZAKIA today Sunday 1st March 10 pm UK time
Thank you so much Zakia Sewell @zzzakia for inviting me to contribute to the Dreambience mix series. 
I chose music which to me resonates with the idea of dreaming but still carries a pulse, and I really hope you will enjoy the selection as much as I do: I overlapped the songs quite a bit and love the new soundscapes and time and geographic collisions that emerged as a result (1990s to 2010s, Venezuela, Japan, US, Italy and Catalunya). 
With music by @molero___a (3 times!) @susumuyokotaofficial @juan.cybotron.atkins @marcoshuttle @xirauofficial @cat_barbieri
If you live outside the UK, you can listen to the mix only live tonight here, but those of you who are UK-based can also listen in replay here.