colleen

Even though outwardly my music is not autobiographical at all, there is always a deep connection between what I feel or would *like* to feel and the music I end up making, and if there is one album of mine that exemplifies this connection, it has to be Les ondes silencieuses.
I recorded it in winter 2006, after learning the basics of the viola da gamba for less than a year, getting a sabbatical from my teaching job, and returning from my first Japanese tour. Prior to the sabbatical, the incompatibility between teaching and music-making on a near-professional level had become more and more glaring every day, and I felt overwhelmed most of the time. Problematically, I still felt overwhelmed even *after* the sabbatical was granted to me, since I was able to accept more offers, and was also trapped in endless administrative tasks.
The trip to Japan proved crucial to the final twist I gave the album, which I’d already half-composed earlier in the year: if my life wasn’t giving me the sense of calm I so badly needed, then I would give my music that sense of calm, in the same way that the Japanese traditional aesthetics made spaces and objects radiate with beautiful, essential simplicity.

I was obsessed with the more introspective side of Baroque music at the time, and short of being able to include a real harpsichord, I managed to locate and rent a spinet, its more modest cousin: I brought it home for a couple of weeks, learnt to get used to its rather stiff action, and recorded “Le labyrinthe” in the living-room of my Paris flat. The silence between the notes in the first section, which strikes me as extreme now, felt entirely natural then, and given the almost complete absence of electricity on that album, dominated by my bass viola da gamba, it’s only natural that the keyboard that ended up on this album should have been made only of wood and metal.
This album has been reissued on coloured and black vinyl by The Leaf Label this year (available through my Bandcamp – also available on CD) and will see its first tape release on 14th October on Beacon Sound (EU customers can order through my Bandcamp, non-EU customers please head over directly to Beacon Sound’s website here ). Both the digital and tape versions contain two unreleased bonus tracks recorded live in Japan during the aforementioned tour. The album is also available on CD.
Artwork is by Iker Spozio.

Of my three albums for Leaf, this is the one I feel closest to, perhaps because it taught me that I could just choose to do anything if I really wanted to – in this particular instance, playing about 10 different instruments on an album, all self-taught except for the guitar.  Three combined factors led me to abandoning sampling: when the time came to play live, I just could not imagine myself with a computer or just a sampler on stage; sampling had become joyless/stale as a method for making a second album (I immediately saw it wasn’t working anymore); and last but not least, having become a teacher, I finally had a proper income for the first time in my life, which enabled me to move from a 17m2  studio to a 40m2  one-bedroom flat – the pinnacle of luxury for a young person in Paris! – and which led to my I-am-going-to-buy-any-instrument-I-can-lay-my-hands-on -no-matter-how-small-or-shitty period, which lasted for about two years. I also acquired the pedals which proved crucial to my live shows for many years (the Boss Loopstation in its early incarnation, the Line6 DL4, and the Akai Headrush).

One of my acquisitions was a super cheap Casio AS67, which had one decent tone only, and that’s the one I used as the basis for “The happy sea”, run through a pretty extreme plugin (I can’t remember which one, but it’s responsible for the almost wah-wah quality of the organ sound), and on top I played a newly-acquired glockenspiel and – salvaged from my childhood – a wooden recorder (lecteurs français de ma génération, je sais que vous aussi vous avez tous eu une flute! J). To this day there’s still something in this song that makes me feel really happy, perhaps it was a premonition that I would one day live by the sea :-)))

This album has been reissued on coloured and black vinyl by The Leaf Label this year (available through my Bandcamp)  and will be released on tape for the first time on 14^th October  on Beacon Sound (EU customers can order through my Bandcamp, non-EU customers please head over directly to Beacon Sound’s website here).

I’ll be posting every day this week to finish this series this weekend, because next week will be full of very very exciting news regarding the new record!

Around 2001, I was given the Acid software by a friend, and I discovered sampling on the computer:  I could finally make my dream of making solo music beyond the confines of my guitar-based practice come true, and obsessively borrowed dozens of CDs of all music genres every week in the mediatheques of Paris, the city where I had moved in 1999 to take a master’s in English. My voracious appetite for all the types of  music to which access had so far been denied to me because of my lack of money led me to this sample-based approach in a very natural way. In 2002 I finished what became my first album, Everyone alive wants answers, but interestingly enough, there is *one* track on the album that does contain music played by myself, and the instrument is… that same Bontempi organ mentioned in Parts 1 and 2!

The original instrument was recorded right after the one I posted a couple of days ago, and even though I initially preferred the very first song, it is the second organ song that ended up on the album, and I’m intrigued by the fact that of all the old recordings I could have used, the Bontempi organ came out the winner: I think it’s because somehow it already seemed ready to blend within the acoustic-meets-electronic-manipulation that I was aiming for with my sampling approach (almost all the samples were of acoustic instruments). As for the “swimming pool down the railway track”, it really did exist, and I saw it on my way to work every day as I went to teach English in a lycée in a Parisian suburb, its slight surrealism in the morning light making the early rising and long transport hours somehow more bearable.

The album has been reissued on coloured and black vinyl by The Leaf Label and on tape by Beacon Sound, head over to Bandcamp if you are curious!

I wrote many songs before I officially started the Colleen project (I was already 27 when my first album was released in 2003), and I’ve forgotten about most of them as the years have gone by, since I never listen to that phase of my musical growth, the difficult years from 1995 to 2000 in which I knew I wanted to make music on my own, but only had a guitar and a 4-track Fostex tape recorder to do so, hence the very real feeling of being stuck. But there is ONE song which I’ve never forgotten and for which I have a deep affection, and it happens to be a song I made on the Bontempi organ I received in Christmas 1984.

In 1995, I had been playing guitar for 4 years, first acoustic, then electric, first by myself, then in a noisy-pop-rock group with friends for 2 years, from the age of 17 to 19. The group ended in 1995 and while I’d loved playing in that group, I also knew that I wasn’t really made for the compromises inherent in group playing. My desire to make music was fierce, and I got a 4-track Fostex tape recorder in the summer of 1995 with the intention of working on my own.
I must have felt intuitively that *just* being a guitar player was limiting me, so I tried to grab whatever I could use as an instrument, including the glockenspiel my mum used in her class (she was a kindergarten teacher) and that famous Bontempi organ.
“Wheezy and slow” is how you could charitably describe the sound that came out of that little beast, so when I wrote and recorded this instrumental with what must have been an appalling microphone, I’m not sure how I felt about it, but immediately afterwards a simple gesture taught me my first lesson in the power of production: I slowed down the tape. That simple act of slowing down the tape transformed the song entirely, and I remember listening to the song, completely mesmerized, thinking “*This* is what I need to do”. You might think I’m exaggerating or being pretentious when I say that slowing down a tape was my first lesson in production, and yet I truly believe that production is – no more, no less – the act of transforming sound to give shape and identity to a piece of music. It doesn’t matter what genre of music you work in, and it doesn’t matter whether you transform the sound in 50 different ways in 100 places over 40 hours of work, or just once in one second: what matters is the result, a transformed sound that suits *your* imagined ideal soundworld.
I have made the song available for the first time, on my Bandcamp, and you can download it for free or pay-as-you-wish, it’s really up to you, I’m just happy to finally share what was the first stepping stone on my journey as a solo composer/interpreter/producer.

I’ve just started a Facebook series called A personal keyboard archeology, in which I’ll be looking at the ways in which I’ve used various keyboard instruments over my years of music-making, and ‘ll post the same contents here for those of you who are not too keen on Facebook! ;-))) 

A PERSONAL KEYBOARD ARCHEOLOGY – PART 1
Christmas 1984. I’m 8 years old and I’ve just received from Mr Fake Santa Claus a Bontempi organ. My dad used to work as a clerk in a bank and each year, the company distributed a Christmas toys catalogue and each kid could choose one present from the catalogue, which was then handed over during an evening where all the employees and their families were treated to a Christmas dinner followed by lots of drunken dancing to the sound of cheesy music. At the time, my world revolved around reading and fluffy toys, so why did I choose that present? Well, in 1984, one of my cousins got a Bontempi organ and it immediately fascinated me, so when I saw it in the catalogue my decision was immediately made.
I’d love to be able to tell you that I was a precocious kid who immediately got creative with that organ, but nothing could be further from the truth: I barely remember what I did with the organ in the following years, and only vaguely remember it came with a couple of sheets that were supposed to indicate which keys you should press to play whichever traditional tune was printed on said sheets – not exactly a creative approach to the instrument.
However, while in interviews I have always replied to the question “How did you start making music?” by saying that I fell in love with the Beatles at age 13 and then started playing the guitar at age 15, I’ve recently realised that the seed was planted earlier, with that organ and my obsession with Michael Jackson’s Thriller album. And while my music has mostly used – up until the new forthcoming album –various stringed instruments – fingerpicked, bowed, strummed, hammered, etc – there’s always been space on each of my albums for at least one keyboard instrument, and I think that sooner or later, I was bound to make the album I’ve just made.
This series is all about revisiting those songs, and in the next instalment you’ll hear the first keyboard song I ever wrote and recorded and which paved the way for all my solo work years later.

 

Last but not least, the tickets for my show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago are finally available, and I thought I’d take this opportunity to share this poster made by photographer Isabel Dublang to recap all the dates of my North American tour !
Oct. 29 2017- Portland, OR, USA – Mississippi Studios – copresented by Beacon Sound – with Derek Hunter Wilson
Oct. 30 2017 – San Francisco, CA, USA – Swedish American Hall
Nov. 1 2017 – Los Angeles, CA, USA – Zebulon – copresented by Dublab – with Mary Lattimore and Frosty DJ Set
Nov. 3 2017 – Chicago, IL, USA – Museum of Contemporary Art
Nov. 5 2017 – Philadelphia, PA, USA – PhilaMOCA – with Tim Woulfe
Nov. 8 2017 – Brooklyn, NY, USA – Good Room – with Jon Porras
Nov. 10 2017 – Montreal, Canada – La Sala Rossa – with Ylang Ylang and Khôra
Nov. 12 2017 – Toronto, Canada – Arraymusic – with Khôra
Nov. 14 2017 – Asheville, NC, USA – The Mothlight
Nov. 19 2017 – Washington, DC, USA – Songbyrd Music House 
Of course feel free to check out the Facebook events and ticket links in my Songkick or live section!

Hope to see you there :-)))