colleen

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.

LIBRES ANTES DEL FINAL LIVE SPRING 2026

I am seriously so happy to share these new live dates with you: I am now booking myself on my own worldwide, it’s been hard work getting those dates together, but I am so grateful to the promoters involved for making these happen, and so excited at the thought of playing the new album live for you!
TICKET LINKS IN SONGKICK and THRILL JOCKEY ARTIST PAGE, also FULL CONCERT LIST IN LIVE PAGE HERE.
NEW ADDED DATES:
11+ 12 April 2026 – Rewire – DEN HAAG, NL – 2 shows!
3 May – Making Time presents Johnny Brenda’s – PHILADELPHIA, PA
11 May – 2220 Arts and Archive – LA, CA 
10 June – TBA – LONDON, UK
22 June – Waking Life Festival – CRATO, PT

I am working on confirming a couple of extra European cities for spring, and there will be more dates in the fall. However, for the US, these will probably be my last dates for a while, as it is highly unlikely I will renew my artist visa after this one expires in September, and as some of you may know, things are very much up in the air as far as the future of artist visas goes.

I have been working hard on rehearsing too, and I’m super pleased with the transitions I have found to make this my most fluid live show so far: it’s going to be me and the Matriarch on stage, absolutely nothing else (well, a small mixer to control volume in case the Matriarch I get for the show has a scratchy volume pot, which can unfortunately happen). 

If you’ve followed me for a while, you’ll know I had made a decision to stop playing live in 2021, and the relief I felt actually allowed me to reverse my decision a few months afterwards. The concerts I gave for Le jour et la nuit du réel in 2023 and 2024 were some of the most positive I ever gave in terms of the pleasure I felt on a human and artistic level, and confirmed that playing live is a priority for me, one that motivates me to take care of my health both mental and physical even more than I would were it not for the perspective of travelling for these shows and having to be “on top” mentally and physically.

I hope to see you there, and from the bottom of my heart, thank you for your support.

LONG PLAY FESTIVAL AT PUBLIC RECORDS, NYC, SAT, MAY 2 202

Over the past 23 years I have played 260 shows as Colleen, and while I have many fond memories of many shows, I can honestly say that performing at Public Records in September 2023 will forever remain a personal, artistic and professional highlight for me. I had heard about the venue’s renowned sound system designed by Devon Turnbull of OJAS @devonojas
and Global Audio Systems, and really wondered what that was going to sound like with my Moog Grandmother-centered album Le jour et la nuit du réel. During soundcheck with engineer @octavedowner I already thought the sound was truly amazing, powerful yet superbly balanced, but it was only once the room was full and I hit the first chords that I started to *feel* the music literally vibrating inside my body and going through my organs, in the best possible way: I had never felt something like this physically while performing, and while on the rest of that tour I did play venues with exceptionally good sound systems operated by equally excellent sound engineers, nothing came close to replicating the full-body sensory experience of playing at Public Records. 
So to say “I am happy to be back” is an understatement: I absolutely cannot wait to hear and feel what my new, Moog Matriarch-only, pulse-driven album Libres antes del final will sound like in this fabulous room, and I am deeply grateful to Bang on a Can and Public Records for the invitation to be a part of Long Play festival.

AS WELL AS MY RETURN TO PHILLY with MAKING TIME at JOHNNY BRENDA’S, 3rd MAY!

Making up for the fact I couldn’t play at Making Time’s 2023 edition because of the tropical storm that hit the East Coast at that moment!

BOOMKAT REVIEW

Finally, it’s a pleasure to share Boomkat’s really beautiful review of the album, which warmed my heart, as they have been super supportive of my work since 2003! They are based in the UK, so a good option to order the album if you live there.

As always, thank you so much for your support!

Dear everyone

These past 2 days have been a whirlwind of announcements and tying the last bits of so many things, I am used to this considering it’s my 9th album, but this time it’s even more intense as I’m in charge of booking my live shows from start to finish. In any case, I am super glad to feel like there’s some action going on after so many months! You will see this newsletter a bit more often from now on, but I hope that like me you rejoice about it :-)))

So, without further ado…

SECOND SINGLE FROM THE NEW ALBUM!

“Mis armas se habían caído al suelo” (My weapons had fallen to the floor) is a declaration of vulnerability, acting as a prologue to what I consider to be the most musically dense and emotionally intense album of my discography. To arrive at its simplicity, brevity and the sonar- like insistence of its first melodic notes, it took me a lot of detours: a totally different song was initially meant to be the opening track, one of the very first I worked on when I started to get acquainted with the Moog Matriarch. I put it aside to keep experimenting and composing, but once I finally completed the rest of the album, I couldn’t help but notice that this first song now sat incongruously along the rest of the material.

“I finally decided to ditch it completely and re-approach the meaning of the words of the title from a different musical perspective: what would metaphorically “putting down my weapons” actually sound like, the peculiar mixture of fear, hope and surrender? I realized that the musical answer lay in a combination of extreme simplicity through three insistent chords and a melodic line acting as a voice that reaches from the abyss and comes up to the surface to stutter, wonder, hesitate, then slowly give in.”

FIRST FLOOR: COLLEEN HAS BETTER TASTE THAN I DO

I was invited by one of the few voices I trust on music industry-related issues, Shawn Reynaldo, who runs the excellent First Floor newsletter, to contribute to his “X has better taste than I do”, where he asks a musician to select a favorite record. I will let you head to the article to find what I selected, and can only recommend you to suscribe to the First Floor Substack, as Shawn writes not only eloquently and elegantly, but also delves deep into numerous important subjects and does not shy away from looking into rarely discussed topics like ethics in the music industry. Insta post here.