colleen

Dear everyone

At long last I’ve managed to gather the energy to do a full website update to include all the stuff that happened around the album release and the immediate tour that followed it: as you probably know, this website is meant to function as a kind of “resources” space, and it’s becoming a bit of a labyrinth, understandably so since I’m documenting 15 years of music-making as Colleen, and each album has been pretty different!

Since this update can also serve as a tour recap of sorts, let me guide you through some of the interviews, videos and other tidbits that may be of interest to you, especially if you’re not a Facebook follower (Facebook is of course way easier to update, but then all the information gets piled up and simultaneously buried…)

But before that, let me announce a rare date in France, 10^th May in Lyon as part of the Nuits Sonores festival, at Le Transbordeur! As I mentioned in December, I’m slowing down on the live front as my body and brain are not able to keep up with the intensity that travelling and planning for shows entails (it’s not the playing that’s the problem, I love it – it’s the stuff that I have to do to make that 1 hour of live music-making happen), so if one of my next shows is not too far from where you live, don’t miss it, as I definitely won’t play A flame my love, a frequency again in the same places: Den Haag / Rewire 2 March, Barcelona / Mutek 7 March, Stockholm 3 May. All details here or on the Songkick!

Now let’s go back to the website update!

INTERVIEWS

I had the immense pleasure of doing some really in-depth interviews while I was on tour or just before leaving, here’s a recap:

The Creative Independent – really complete interview on my approach to creativity

Resident Advisor Machine Love – another really complete interview on my creative and recording process, from a more technical point of view

Fractured Air – a long interview focused on the new album

Manifesto 21 – entretien en Français retraçant une grande partie de mon parcours et en particulier A flame my love, a frequency

Soul Kitchen – entretien court en Français factuel sur les origines de A flame my love, a frequency 

LIVE SESSIONS AND INTERVIEWS

These are most of the videos that have been shot of me playing live in venues or radio sessions. For radio I chose to play the same songs, since playing on the radio in France or the US is of course supposed to be geared towards different audiences, and the trio of “Winter dawn/Summer night (Bat song)/The stars vs creatures” is one of the easiest ones in terms of gear transition and mixing desk settings. It’s stressful enough to change these during live shows, but imagine how it feels during a *live* radio session… especially if you’ve left all the notes you so carefully prepared in your hotel room!!! True story of what I did in New York for the WNYC session!!! I now know better and have detailed photographs of the sheets on my smartphone and on my Dropbox, should this unfortunate event happen again!

With hindsight I kind of regret that now the video and audio traces I have are mostly of the same songs, but that’s life I guess…

Live interview and session for WNYC New Sounds, New York, 7 November 2017

Live in Paris, radio studio Studio 104 for Foule Sentimentale programme for France Inter, 23 November 2017 (Winter dawn / Summer night (Bat song) / The stars vs creatures)

Summer night (Bat anthem) in Lisbon, ZDB, 7 December 2017 – an alternative version of Summer night (Bat song) which I’ve been playing at encores at live shows

Live in Paris (Boulogne-Billancourt), BBmix festival, 25 November 2017 (Winter dawn – special live version / Summer night (Bat song) / The stars vs creatures / A flame my love, a frequency)

AUDIO

Dublab’s Celsius Drop live interview and session recorded in Los Angeles, 2 November 2017. Perhaps because I’d only managed to get a few hours of sleep between the LA show and waking up for the session, I extremely annoyingly use the words “you know” and “like” like, you know, 50 times! ;-))) A little bit of the session was lost due to a computer bug, so the end of Separating and all of Another world were lost, but you still get to hear: Separating (first half) / Winter dawn – special live version / Summer night (Bat song) / One warm spark.

Live radio session, at Studio 104 for Foule Sentimentale programme for France Inter radio, Paris 23 November 2017, official audio of the youtube video above  (Winter dawn / The stars vs creatures)

LYRICS

It was only recently that I realised that I hadn’t updated the lyrics page here for A flame, and that my Bandcamp did not include any lyrics – corrected now! :-)

MY STUDIO

I’ve added more of the beautiful photos taken by Isabel Dublang for the Resident Advisor article. Here are a few of them.

LIVE PHOTOS

Added mostly photos from Vera Marmelo’s photo report of my soundcheck and show at Lisbon’s ZDB on 7th December 2017

And also this one which I love of the Studio 104 performance in Paris, taken by Marion Seury from the engineer’s room: anything that looks like I’m playing in the cosmos looks good to me! ;-)

As always thanks for watching this space and caring about my music, it means the world to me!

Happy new year everyone!

I have a video and an interview to share with you to start this year, both creation-focused, which I think is the right way to start the year! The Thrill Jockey Records folks took advantage of my presence in Chicago on November 3rd for my show at the Museum of Contemporary Art to ask me to present the gear that was used to make “A flame my love, a frequency” in studio, and which I also use live: I don’t even know how I managed to explain all of this, given that this was after the show and at the end of my infamous first-week-of-touring-where-i-burn-transformers-then-buy-the-wrong-transformers-and-still-don’t-have-my-own-transformers-by-the-4th-show, I had slept 2 hours and spent the whole day trying to locate transformers until I finally did find them… Let’s say I was tired but relieved ;-))) Anyway, I’m glad we filmed this, as this is something I wanted to do anyway! If you have any technical questions please don’t hesitate to ask! Thanks a lot to Julia Dratel for doing the filming! And Moog Music Inc., Critter & Guitari and Soundcraft Mixers for the amazing gear!

And the following is one of my favourite interviews ever, from a great website, The Creative Independent. An entire interview centered on what it means to be creative over the years, how you can try to preserve that flame, and if you don’t have time to read the whole thing, I recommend reading just my reply to the last question “Is there something that you wish somebody had told you when you were first starting out?”
So here’s to a peaceful and slowly creative 2018 :-)))

As I’m slowly recovering from my pharyngitis, I’m reflecting on a year full of learning and artistic and human experiences.  I do think I reached the limits of my physical and psychological capacities, so my aim for 2018 will be to prioritize rest and a sense of slowness over productivity, online presence and live shows. Which leads me to end of the year lists. A flame my love, a frequency has without a doubt led me to work the hardest I’ve ever worked in my entire life, so even though I do think any “best of the year” list has to be taken for what it is – a reflection of the magazine/webzine’s tastes, and not some kind of “objective truth” –, in a world inundated with thousands of new albums every year, I am grateful that the album has made it to several  best of 2017 lists, reaching number 2 on FACT Magazine, and is also included in the lists of The Vinyl Factory, The Quietus, The Vinyl District, Textura, Tiny Mix Tapes, and a couple more.

This photo of me is from a series that the super talented Portuguese photographer Vera Marmelo took during the soundcheck and show at Lisbon’s Galeria Ze Dos Bois earlier this month. I don’t know why my hand is in that position (trying to see the audience? realising I dialled something wrong in the dozens of settings I have to change for each song??? ), but I just really like that photo, its softness encapsulates the sense of trust and well-being that I feel whenever I play in that very special venue :-))) You can see the whole series here.

Last but not least, pour les Francophones, un long entretien fait avant mon concert au festival BBMix pour Manifesto XXI, où l’on évoque Delia Derbyshire, le passage de prof d’anglais à musicienne à temps plein, Facebook, ma récente session chez Moog, et plein d’autres choses liées au dernier album et à mon approche musicale en général ! Merci Alice!

I have some good news and bad news in this post: I am so sorry to have to cancel my participation in Alien Disko Festival tomorrow in Munich: I was really looking forward to playing this beautifully-curated festival, but I felt on the verge of falling ill all week, and now it’s happened: I have pharyngitis, and having had it last year just before a concert, I know that travelling with this and attempting to play and sing is a *really* bad idea, as the symptoms get worse with travelling and working. I know that for sure I would end up with a fever and generally worsened symptoms that would probably prevent me from performing anyway. It is only the second time in 14 years of live playing and more than 220 shows that I cancel a show for health reasons, so if I’m doing it it’s because it’s really necessary. I do apologize to those of you who were hoping to see me there…

(PS: for those who don’t follow me on Facebook, on Sunday I was stranded with thousands of other passengers in Stansted airport, London, because of the bad weather; I ended up having to spend 3 extra days in London, so that and the fact that St John on Bethnal Green where I played on Saturday was pretty cold + weeks of travelling and not sleeping enough are probably the reason why my body has now decided it’s had enough…)

Ironically, I do have some very good news to announce on the live European front: I have some really exciting dates lined up for this spring, I hope to see you there, and in the meantime, I’m going to have a nice long rest so I can be in the best of shapes to play again! Here is the full list of dates

1 February 2018, Berlin, Germany – CTM festival, HAU 1 Theatre – tickets

2 March 2018, Den Haag, Holland – (P)Rewire with Laurel Halo, Korzo Theatre

7 March 2018, Barcelona, Spain – Mutek, Institut Français – tickets

3 May 2018, Stockholm, Sweden – Fasching – full announcement and tickets available next week

A quick post to remind you that the December “mini-leg” of my tour has arrived, starting with Lisbon ZDB tomorrow 7 December, London St John on Bethnal Green on 9 December, and Munich Alien Disko Festival on 16 December (be careful, the Facebook event lists 15 December but that’s because that’s the start of the festival)! As usual all details are in my songkick or the live section of this website! :-))) There will be a few more European shows in the spring, but don’t miss these ones if they are near to you and you want to catch me playing the new album live!

Also wanted to share the link to the amazing Machine Love feature that Resident Advisor have run on my music! It’s been such an honour to give one of the most in-depth interviews I’ve ever done on my working process ! Mark Smith visited my studio in San Sebastián back in September and we spent the afternoon talking about my entire discography, how I record, how I approach live playing, and so much more stuff that’s dear to me! I really hope that you will like reading this article and interview as much as I enjoyed replying to Mark’s questions, and the articles also features the best photos ever taken of my studio (and me in the studio – something that never happens since usually I’m the one taking photos ;-) by the super talented Isabel Dublang – the picture below is my absolute favorite, it really captures what the studio looks like on a sunny day, and what I try to transmit with my music: light :-) :-) :-)

I am finally back from what was my biggest North American tour ever (10 shows + several video and radio sessions across 10 cities in the US and Canada!) and am slowly catching up with everything. I will write a longer post with links and photos from the tour, but before I do that, I wanted to post the last part of my Make your own clothes series which I ended up writing in Portland, as I ran out of time before I left, precisely because I was sewing a made-to-measure padded protection bag for my Soundcraft Signature 12 MTK mixing desk! ;-))) (PS: and it worked! the desk has survived the many flights unharmed, and at least 5 TSA inspections!!! ;-))) So here goes ;-)))

MAKE YOUR OWN CLOTHES! SERIES: PART 3 – FUNCTION, COLOR, HOW TO GET STARTED AND THE POWER OF LEARNING.

I wanted to close this mini-series with two of the main reasons why I fell in love with sewing, and then leave you with a few guidelines of how you can get started, even with very little money.

When I moved from Paris to Spain by the Atlantic coast, many of the things that made sense in Paris clothing-wise became irrelevant or even started to look ridiculous in a place where mostly what you want is freedom of movement to enjoy the beach and the more natural environment in general. At the other end of this need for practical clothing, I also wanted to have more special clothes for my shows, and one of my favorite items of clothing for both everyday and special occasion is shorts, and I couldn’t believe how difficult it was for me to find the type of shorts I wanted. So I could say I literally started to sew because I was tired of looking for and not finding things that did not seem *that* difficult to make, and did not even require a huge amount of fabric.

I had also started to feel the need to dress in brighter and lighter colors for a few years before I started sewing, and that need became overwhelming in the winter of 2015 when I felt so down: all of a sudden I literally could not stand the idea of dressing in dark colours (and this comes from someone who dressed in black and dark blue for years without even really thinking about it). The fashion cycle has a way of imposing colors on customers which I think borders on insulting, and when you sew your own clothes you have that many more possibilities to choose exactly the fabric you want, both in terms of its content/origin and color.

Once you’ve experienced the freedom that sewing gives you in terms of choosing pattern and fabric, it’ll probably be really hard for you to go back to a world of ready-to-wear, because your first reaction will be: Could I make this and do it better? and so often the answer is Yes! And you don’t even want to get me started on all the other things that you can start to make yourself: things for your home, the exact accessories that you need (I’ve just made a padded case for my mixing desk, for instance), even items for your pets (I made bedsheets for our cat’s bed thingy and it makes so much sense to be able to wash these, just like you wash your own bedsheets!)!

So how do you get started? I guess this partly depends on where you live: I imagine that if you live in a city where there is an active sewing scene, it would probably be a good idea to just get a few basic sewing lessons and see how the act of sewing makes you feel. But I believe it’s also totally possible to start sewing on your own – like I did – with just the help of online tutorials (I recommend Grainline Studio, Colette Patterns/Seamwork and Megan Nielsen for their extensive library of tutorials) and reading sewing blogs that correspond to the type of clothes you’d like to make (not much point looking at a blog that focuses on vintage-style sewing if your thing is minimalist fashion, and vice versa). If you have a friend that can let you use their machine, great (that’s what happened to me), and as soon as you can, upgrading to your own quality machine will really make a difference.

At this point I feel I should mention that there are many approaches to sewing and that it’s easy to feel overwhelmed when looking at Instagram accounts and sewing blogs, especially those where the sewist produces a ton of different clothes every month or even week – it’s easy to forget when looking at these that producing these many clothes requires a considerable amount of time, not to mention money in terms of fabric, and of course it begs the question: is this type of sewing not just the sewing version of being addicted to clothes? I’ll leave you to be the judge of that, but in any case, I believe it’s totally possible to build a slow hand-made wardrobe, little by little, and I know that for me this is what really makes sense.

In the spirit of not overconsuming, I also believe that you don’t need to own a ton of patterns, and in fact a super simple way of starting can be to just carefully deconstruct some of your favorite but worn out clothes and make patterns out of the pieces laid flat. You can use bedsheets or thrifted fabric or oversized clothes from charity shops as simple fabric resources at least at the beginning. Once you feel confident that you could now make a real piece of clothing that you could actually wear, I do recommend buying fabric that you really feel attracted to, because that’ll be the crucial difference between a piece which is just ok and one that you just want to wear over and over again.

Last but not least, I really think that learning a new skill is *always* empowering and is one of the best investments we can do with our time, helping us to be appreciative of the good work made by others while remaining critical in a society overflowing with consumer goods. When I learnt ceramics for 2 years during my music break, I just loved how all of a sudden my way of looking at everyday items became different, and how I could judge for myself whether or not something was truly well made, or was worth the money it was being sold for.

I really hope that this short series may have inspired you on your own sewing adventure!

Top pattern: True Bias Ogden cami, fabric: Japanese Pearls seersucker, Miss Matatabi. Shorts: self-drafted, fabric: organic chambray, Les Trouvailles d’Amandine (great resource for French-produced organic fabrics!)

 A flame my love a frequency is finally out and I have no words to tell you how happy I am about that! You can watch the tour trailer made by Flavia Martinez on my song “Another world” to see all the dates that will start in exactly one week from now, including a fourth European date at the Notwist-curated ALIEN DISKO # 2 festival in Munich on 16th December! And there will be more European dates in the spring!

The first interview I did on the album back in August for the Brainwashed podcast is now available here, and I was also recently asked some questions for French website Soul Kitchen, here.

Also, in seemingly unrelated news, but not so unrelated as you might think, I’m doing a mini-series of posts on Facebook entitled “Make your own clothes!”. Here are the first 2 parts and there will be a 3^rd one right before I leave.

As always, thanks for reading and listening! :-)))

MAKE YOUR OWN CLOTHES! SERIES: PART I – WHY TALK ABOUT SEWING?

If you didn’t see this one coming, well, neither did I: if you had told me 2 years ago that 90% of what I would wear and carry in 2017 would be handmade by myself, I would have told you “Yeah, right”, and yet all the clothes I’m wearing on the press pics for the new album, recent videos and in the forthcoming live shows have been made by myself over the course of the past 6 months. And if you think this short series is going to be about “fashion”, well, not really: ethics, anti-consumerism, form and function, positive mood influence, empowerment through learning – all of these coupled with the beauty and quality of lovingly-made-to-measure items – are the reasons I make my own clothes. Why do I want to share this with you? Well, it feels really special to go on tour with clothes I’ve made myself (believe me, when you go on tour for a month with only one suitcase that is mostly filled with your gear, you really want your clothes to work for you), and there are definitely parallels in the way I see clothes-making and music-making: just as I believe that it is possible to make a record from A to Z on your own (with a lot of dedication, failures, steep learning curves and good advice thrown in, *obviously*), I wish I had known earlier how doable making clothes is, and since the aforementioned themes are important to me, I hope that if some of you reading this have been thinking about starting to make their own clothes but have been hesitating to take the plunge, perhaps these posts will be the small nudge needed for you to just do it: it is worth it in so many ways.
The outfit in this press pic is one I thought of even before the record was finished, as I fell in love with the incredible colour and pattern of the Japanese fabric, and knew I wanted some coords to mimic the look of a jumpsuit but without the inconvenients of the jumpsuit ;-) Fabric: ATELIER to nani IROMountains in blue. Top pattern: Trop Top by Ivanne S (for those of you who read French, I cannot recommend this pattern-maker enough). Shorts pattern: self-drafted.
PS: I have never been given anything by any of the fabric or pattern companies mentioned, and I’ve never posted anything up till now about sewing, so they don’t even know I exist or use their products.

MAKE YOUR OWN CLOTHES! SERIES: PART 2 – THE ENVIRONMENT, ETHICS AND ANTI-CONSUMERISM VIA SEWING.

As many of you probably know by now, either through my interviews or my lyrics, nature is very dear to me, and birdwatching since 2013 has taken my interest in and commitment to the preservation of the environment to another level. Protecting our habitats and all the creatures that live in it can only go hand in hand with respect for basic human rights, and in both those environmental and ethical aspects, clothing is one of the areas where our choices do have a real impact. Companies that are more transparent in terms of how they source and treat their materials, as well as their workers, are becoming more and more numerous, which is of course a cause for celebration, but there is also a lot of greenwashing marketing going on, and educating yourself on the complex matters of textile production and garment manufacturing, as well as trying to locate truly ethically-made “green” clothing, can lead you to days and days of online browsing, sometimes only to find out the company does not ship to where you live, that it’s just too expensive for you, or that yes it does seem ethical but they just don’t have what you’re looking for. Anti-consumerism and minimalism can solve part of the problem: buy less but better, and think ten times before you buy that thing you don’t actually need.
In all these aspects, sewing – not just your clothes, but also the accessories you use every day, the furnishings in your home, etc – is a really powerful tool, both in terms of providing the motivation to stay away from multinational clothing companies and obtaining the actual items you need. I can guarantee that once you’ve experienced or at least understood how much skill and time it takes to sew, say, a shirt, you will truly understand why a 10 euro price tag in a certain Swedish chain is completely abnormal – but the problem is further compounded by the fact that a higher price tag does not necessarily mean the worker has been better paid, or that the textile is greener. Sourcing organic fabric or fabric made in more respectful ways than the usual synthetic textiles or highly-polluting non-organic cotton that fills retail stores is getting easier and easier, meaning that making your own organic or “cleaner-than-retail” clothes is also becoming easier and easier, and can be way cheaper than buying it.
Of course this is a highly complex problem with no simple one-fits-all solution, and indeed I realize that not everyone can /wants /has the time to sew. I also lay no claims to perfection: I do my best, but I’m aware that I’m wearing Adidas trainers on some of my press pictures, hardly the most ethical company in the world… However I do believe that for those who are creatively-inclined, sewing can be an awesome doorway to respond to the basic human necessity that clothing ourselves is, while giving us joy, enabling us to disconnect, making our brains work, and leading us to realize just how truly grateful we should be for all the people that are behind the clothing we have or have had on our backs.
PS: Please see Alberto’s comment about second-hand clothes and my reply! :-)
Fabric: ATELIER to nani IRO Jewel Song Pocho quilted double gauze. Jacket pattern: Monceau by Cozy Little World (French pattern – I drafted and added a silk and cotton lining).
Photos by Isabel Dublang.