colleen

On 20^th October 2017 Thrill Jockey Records released my sixth album A flame my love, a frequency, and I’m so happy to let you know that to celebrate this second anniversary, the session I recorded at the Moog Soundlab in Asheville, North Carolina, in fall 2017,  is now available in lossless quality as a free/pay-as-you-wish download on my Bandcamp! I had a blast playing in the Moog Soundlab and visiting the Moog Music Inc factory, and while I’m one for keeping my discography pretty compact, I do feel this is a very good document of how being on the road can lead you deeper into the world of sound via the discovery of new instruments – in this case right in the place where the instruments are made!

Moog originally put the recordings on their Soundcloud and website in August 2018 to mark the end of the production of the Moogerfooger line of products, but you can now head over here to listen and download the EP, which comes with accompanying pdf, photos from the session and my visit, and hi-res artwork by the always great Iker Spozio.

A sincere and deep thank you to everyone at Moog Music Inc and the Moog Soundlab for their time, generosity, the impeccable quality of the products they make, and their support for my music!

I have voluntarily restricted the number of shows I do, so my show in Milan at Fondazione Prada this week September 27th as part of Craig Richard’s “I want to like you but I find it difficult” series is a rare occasion to catch me live this year, and possibly the next couple of years.

I also wanted to share with you the following picture, showing Iker Spozio’s original painting that served as the basis for his design for my last album A flame my love, a frequency, at home with the 3 colored vinyl that have so far been produced: clear, white and blue (the last two being still available). It’s hard to believe the album will be 2 years old next month!

As always thanks for your support :-)

So here goes, a short video (apologies for the definitely non-professional quality!) showing you where I’ve been making music for the past few weeks, and the instruments I’ll be using for my seventh album! I will let the video do the talking (by the way, the studio is at the back of the FLAT where I live – I don’t know why I totally ate up that word!!! 😉), and if you are wondering why I’m back in a home studio setup then I invite you to read the 4 previous posts I wrote in this series! Thank you to Moog Music for the stellar instruments and to Soundgas for their help with the Elka Drummer One! I will go quiet again for some time as obviously I now need and want to make progress on the album, which I’m hoping to get ready for release in 2020. As always thanks so much for reading and listening!

Four months ago I was telling you about how I had finally recovered the rights to my first 3 albums and EP after a long legal battle, and I am so so very happy to let you know that finally, those records are available again, and have found a new loving home thanks to Thrill Jockey Records! Not only that, but my least-widely available album, 2013’s The weighing of the heart, originally released on Second Language in 2013, is now available via anost.net, the record mailorder of Morr Music.

So here’s the lowdown: we only bought part of the Leaf vinyl stock, not all of it, and we did not buy any of the CD stock. Please note:

1) All the albums are available on black vinyl on both my Bandcamp and Thrill Jockey’s webshop, but for coloured vinyl, please compare between Bandcamp and the TJ webshop, as availability will vary.

2) Bandcamp orders are now fulfilled by Thrill Jockey *from the US* – which is great news for those of you who live over there and so far had to pay prohibitive shipping prices from the UK.  3) If you live outside the US, then it might be best for you to shop from Thrill Jockey’s webshop, which can send from both the US *and* the UK.

4) If you are after CDs of my early output, the best place to get them now is Thrill Jockey’s webshop, and they will ship from the UK: the available quantities are extremely limited, and it’s unlikely that my albums will ever be reprinted on CD, which is a dying format, so take advantage of the few dozen copies that remain.

5) The Beacon Sound tapes are available again on my Bandcamp, shipping from the US. A few are also still available directly from Beacon Sound’s webshop.

6) The weighing of the heart is now for sale on CD and vinyl via my Bandcamp and anost.net, the record mailorder of Morr Music – in both cases getting shipped from Germany, with – I’m pleased to say – fairly competitive pricing for non-EU customers (at least much better than the ridiculous Spanish postage fees I had to charge you!).

A big thank you to Morr Music, a huge one to Thrill Jockey Records, Nicole Kasper in particular for handling all the dirty work of putting things up for sale, and the biggest thank you of all goes to Thrill Jockey’s Bettina Richards for all her help in making this happen and giving a new life to those records – THANK YOU BETTINA!!! :-)

And to celebrate, here’s the beautiful video made by Makino Takashi for “Humming fields” from The weighing of the heart back in 2013! :-)

Part III on my series on the space needed by makers! :-)

When I decided to move to San Sebastián in 2010, I knew that I would not have the option of working from home as I did in Paris, as the flat where I would live simply did not have a sufficient amount of space available, and I was also acutely aware of being clearly in need of a space where I could focus on going back to making music, far away from the potential distractions of home, whether that meant replying to emails, getting the laundry done, or trying that new cake recipe (I was really passionate about cooking back then!). I went in search of the ideal “local” (the Spanish word for ground floor or basement spaces not intended for living), no easy task given how insanely expensive San Sebastián already was, and ended up finding one in a neglected area of my neighbourhood: even though it stank of mould (it hadn’t been used in years and was formerly a brinery distributing olives and guindilla peppers to the local bars), I immediately felt drawn to its high wooden ceiling and overall feel. It also seemed like just the right amount of space, with 21m2 downstairs, and a mezzanine of roughly the same size, high enough for me to stand up, welcome my ceramics, vinyl and music book collection, and instrument cases – and more crucially, this mezzanine could act as a “cushion” protecting the 1^st floor neighbours from the sound of my music. It was also really close to where I lived, and a mere 5 minutes walk from the Zurriola beach – what more could I want?

We set about “improving” it as best as we could, with a super conservative budget given that I initially thought I wouldn’t necessarily spend many years there, and you can see our work in the 3 before/after pictures. The doors were from the 1940s, so to say they were drafty is an understatement,  half of the ground was just bare ground and so uneven we couldn’t even add flooring and had to make do with just covering it with some kind of aluminium-coated material and bamboo carpets, and the mould problem never did go away: the city is built on sand, meaning most ground level places have damp rising from the ground.

In spite of all these flaws, the place provided me with what I needed most: concentration. I had no smartphone at the time, and the place had no internet connection: when I went there, the only thing I could possibly make was music, and so I did. I also found that the fact I was paying rent each month on that space meant that I felt guilty when not using it, and this also pushed me to show up and use the space even when I felt I’d rather just take some time off.

Having more space meant that I was able to slowly upgrade in all the necessary areas (near field monitors with sub and PA with sub were especially game changers) and buy instruments I wouldn’t have dreamt of having in a flat, such as a floor tom. Even more crucially, I finally felt and knew no one could hear me, which gave me the psychological freedom to try the things I was afraid of trying in my flat, starting with singing, and then learning percussion. The next step was discovering the joys of rehearsing on a real PA with my amplified treble viola da gamba and discovering the power of bass once I added an octaver pedal to my viola for Captain of None.

I can safely say that without this space, my music wouldn’t have evolved the way it did.  But renting this space was not without problems, and that’s what I’ll tell you about in the next instalment.

In other news, I’ve had the great pleasure of being interviewed lengthily for Turkish magazine T24!
The photo is one I took in a small side street of Istanbul, I love the sweet calm poetry emanating from this mural painting, and hope I will be back soon in this incredible city :-)

Thanks for reading as always! 😊

Disclaimer: You will note that I’m not talking of home studio vs professional studio: I’m well aware that a truly professional recording studio is not the same as using a shop/workshop-type space and turning into a studio-of-sorts, which is exactly what I did in San Sebastián. At no point was it set up to record other acts at a professional “commercial” level, which would be a venture of a different kind, requiring a technical know-how which I do not possess and a financial investment that would no make sense for the “unusual” solo recording musician that I am. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m talking about the possibility of opting for a workspace that’s outside the home, as opposed to having to make music inside your home – and even within those two ends of the spectrum, there are variations (dedicated space vs using a room that already fulfils another daily life purpose for instance). Of course a few people have the luxury of having a professional-grade studio inside their home, but they are so few and far between that I’m not really thinking of them here! Also, my reasons for *not* recording in a professional studio are beyond the scope of this discussion, but even if I did record in a professional studio, I would still need a place to *make* music.

I would like to go back in time and share a bit more about where and how I recorded my first three albums. The Colleen project was born during my two years preparing the agrégation d’anglais in Paris and then completing teacher training: borrowing records and trying to make music using software on a computer I’d bought the previous year to write my master’s thesis were the only two things I allowed myself during that time. I lived in a 17 m2 studio flat in the XVème arrondissement, and “Everyone alive wants answers” was born in that tiny space. When I got the opportunity to do my first shows, I immediately felt like reconnecting with the guitar, and I had by then developed a strong interest in musical instruments from various time periods and geographical areas. With my teacher’s salary, I started to gather a few instruments and sampling pedals, and the studio flat became very crowded indeed.

The year after the release of my first album, I found a 40 m2 flat – a luxury in Paris for a single person, and when I started to make music in the tiny living-room, it could have been Versailles as far as I was concerned! I recorded all of my second album “The Golden morning breaks” in that living room, with gear of extremely poor quality, but it somehow worked out perfectly for the sound I was looking for. However, when I switched to the bass viola da gamba – by far the best quality instrument I’d ever owned – for ”Les ondes silencieuses”, I was faced with the blatant problem of a discrepancy between how great the viola sounded in itself and how poor it sounded when I tried to record it with my very limited gear and technique. Mastering engineer Emiliano Flores, who is also an apt recording engineer, came to the rescue and – interestingly for the purposes of this discussion – he proceeded to record me playing a great deal of “Les ondes” in the attic at his parents’ house in the suburbs of Paris – so again, not a professional studio space by any means.  I took notes of the mike placements he was using, and he sold me the mike I still use to this day on all my albums, along with a good preamp. I was then able to record the rest of the album at home, mostly parts that needed more layering and/or improvisation, or the spinet song (I got a harpsichord player to rent me a spinet for a month – this is the picture that you see, taken by Iker Spozio as part of the study material for the album’s artwork). By now you’ve probably understood how intimate the whole recording process is for me, and I became determined to learn enough to *not* have to rely on someone else’s expertise again if it could be avoided.

But while the lack of space, of intimacy (this became a big one when I decided to try to learn to sing in early 2010!) and fear of disturbing my neighbours were three real problems in Paris, they weren’t the biggest: CONCENTRATION was. By 2008, even though I had stopped teaching in 2006, I was chronically stressed out through overworking, problems with the label that released my records, and an overwhelming, neverending administrative and email burden. I would start making music, but the urge to check emails to see if something had arrived, been sorted, etc, was just too strong.

I have told this story in an even more detailed way in two longs posts published on my blog years and years ago (here and here), so won’t repeat it here, but will just mention again that it was during stone carving lessons, reflecting on the way my teacher worked (in a garden, from more or less 8 am till 8 pm, with – obviously – no computer in sight) that I finally understood that my biggest problem was indeed a concentration problem, and that I needed to get rid of all distractions, and build a new discipline for myself, within a new space.