colleen

I’ll keep this short for once: please head to the BIO for a double treat 😃 First of all I hope you will enjoy the labour of love that was this mini-documentary by @luistorroja on the making of my last album. I call it “documentary”, but it really is a hybrid visual object due to the poetic nature of Luis Torroja’s outlook on my creative process and his own artistic sensibilities (that ending… A love letter to machines ❤️❤️❤️)
Heartfelt thanks to Luis for pouring so much energy, time and care into this project, in circumstances that were less than ideal: we had extremely restricted practical resources (the crew was him and me, basically!) and the tiny nature of my studio (7 sq m2 – 75 sq ft) coupled with Covid did not make our task easier, but I really hope you will get a sense of where and how this album was made, and feel the magic of the machines which I felt became my bandmates for this project.
You can watch the documentary directly on Moog’s Youtube or on the Moog page. where you will also find more material: an interview, a patch sheet and extra video filmed by yours truly showing the setup for album closer “Hidden in the Current”.

A huge thank you to @moogsynthesizers 🙏🙏🙏 for making this documentary available to a wider audience, for their 2017 invitation to play at the Moog Soundlab – which remains a highlight of my career and became the A Flame Variations EP – and for their generous gear donation which has contributed to a considerable broadening of my sonic horizons on this last album.
Beautiful Elka Drummer One light @soundgasltd ❤️
AS ALWAYS THANKS FOR YOUR SUPPORT!!!

When I finished The Tunnel on 1st December, I sincerely thought I would start working straight away on LP8 (and I announced so). I had no clue I would embark on what has been the longest promo campaign I’ve ever had for any album, and of course I’m not going to complain about that. Simply put, there was no time left whatoever for anything creative during the past 8 months, but today I recorded my last phone interview (for my fourth and final mix for @bbcradio3 Late Junction on 13th August), which means that I have officially finished the campaign (I don’t think much more will come my way)

It’s a coincidence that today is also the day I have the immense pleasure of being back on the WFMU airwaves (I visited WFMU’s studio twice if my memory serves me right, 2005 and 2007): without a doubt, Dublab and WFMU are the radios that have most supported my work (special mention too to David Garland and his WNYC show Spinning on Air!!!), and it was an absolute pleasure to talk with Olivia, WFMU’s musical director, for her show Radio Ravioli. My interview airs at 4 pm EST/10 pm CET (the show will be archived at 7 pm EST). I especially loved talking with her about singing and singing lessons, and the connection with therapy.

But my head, heart and ears are now finally free to embark on this next album about which I’m M-A-D-L-Y excited: I want it to be the sunny and wild companion to The Tunnel and I intend to let absolutely loose. The focus will be rhythm, and today I laid the groundwork for the steepest learning curve facing me for this project: good drum machine compression (because of course my Elka Drummer One is going to be my main companion)! Thankfully my trusted mastering ally Antony Ryan of Isan and Red Red Paw Mastering is on board with me and it is my hope that getting this compression business right will be a matter of weeks, not months. In the process I had to download a new version of my trusty old Acid to allow setting up an Arturia plugin , and now from an operational point of view everything is ready! Yeaaaaahhhhhh!!!!!!

Moog Synthesizers will premiere the mini documentary that Luis Torroja made on my album The Tunnel and the Clearing on 5th August.

MEMORY GLITCH, OR THE THROWN AWAY AND FORGOTTEN CASSETTE PLAYER.In September 2017, I released “Organ Song 1995” on my Bandcamp: a song made in 1995 on a Bontempi Avril organ I got as a present when I was 8 (Christmas 1984). I wrote a text (part of a series entitled “A personal keyboard archaeology”) to accompany that one-off release, which was meant as a gesture of endearment for the song that enabled me to discover the power of production through simply slowing down the tape when playing the recording.  

More than 20 years after the fact, I assumed that this must have been recorded with a cheap microphone on the 4-track Fostex XR-5 tape recorder I had gotten that same year. Mistake. Spending time here now at the house where I grew up, I unearthed the Fostex, and all of a sudden realized with absolute clarity that the song had been recorded prior to getting the Fostex, on the small, flat, rectangular  tape player and recorder I used for years to listen to music, before I got my first compact hifi system. Which means that it wasn’t even recorded with a microphone. The player had a slow down tape function, and I just played it back that way. To the best of my knowledge (I’m being cautious now), there is no effect: I didn’t own effects pedals at the time, and think the depth of the sound comes purely from the sheer amount of slowed down organ noise + tape artefacts. 

All of this is of course of very little importance, but I was struck by the fact that the seed of the Colleen project is even more simple and humble than I thought, and struck too that my memories could have been confused so easily, with me writing inaccurate information about my own musical history, all the while being convinced I was telling things reliably.This involuntary unreliability of memory and retelling strikes a chord with me on both a personal and family level and on a more global level, the world being what it is right now…

I looked for the tape player today, but it seems we threw it away some time ago… A shame, because I would have loved to re-enact that primal production scene…

Post written on 28th July.

I am not a nostalgic person. You will never hear me wax lyrical about the “good old days” (given I’m 45, I could easily be going down that road already). I do however increasingly recognize that some brief, lightning-like moments shape our lives forever. I mentioned in my 60s special mix last week for @jonivoid @ckutmtl that “A day in the life” was single-handedly responsible for me truly falling in love with music, understanding that this wasn’t going to be just another thing on top of other things I loved, like reading. But the Beatles shaped my life twice, though the second time was indirect, and happened exactly  30 years ago to this day. 
On 28th July 1991, my parents, my brother and myself were coming back from a van trip to Norway – the farthest we’d ever gone. We stopped in Copenhagen for a few hours. I never went to big cities as a teenager, and in my small, boring hometown, had never been exposed to live music either. On that day in Copenhagen, two street musicians with acoustic guitars were playing Beatles covers. I stood transfixed. Begged my parents to stay for a few more songs. They refused. In my mum’s travel notebook (which enabled us to find out, yesterday, when I casually mentioned that this episode had happened “about 30 years ago”, that the exact anniversary was going to be today), the musicians and their effect on me don’t even appear.
A few weeks later, I gathered my courage and asked my parents if they might buy me an acoustic guitar. I was somehow convinced they would refuse, but they didn’t. In September 1991, lo and behold, I was the proud owner of a classical guitar, which is the one you can hear on all my recordings from 2005 to 2013. A guitar on which I immediately, spontaneously, started to compose snippets of songs, in a way that is totally in keeping with how I still work today. Getting close to that spirit of wonder with each new recording project is the only valid way for me to somehow connect with the past: not as an exercise in nostalgia, but as a way to try and capture the energy of love for something that is bigger than me.