colleen

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.

So happy to share a 3rd mix (1 more to go!) for McGill’s University’s radio station CKUT in Montreal for the “If you got ears” programme at the kind request of guest-host Jean Cousin who not only makes music as Joni Void but also runs his own excellent Everyday Ago label and like me is a passionate listener and mix-maker. Mixes are time-consuming and after 3 hours of selection already (you can still listen to the mixes I made for NTS, Dublab and Dublab.es – all links in the mix section), I really had to think hard about what this new one-hour mix could be.. and as I always, I ended up being pushed to revisit the music I love and have sometimes forgotten, and feeling grateful for the chance.

So this is a 60s special. You don’t need me to explain to you how important and utterly unique that decade was for music. I personally truly fell in love with music as an art form (as opposed to something I loved listening to on the radio, but had no clue about it being a composed, performed and recorded artifact) when I first heard The Beatles’ “A day in the life”. If I had to choose one song that changed my life this would be it – in a very literal way since I credit *that* song and no other for making me want to make music.

The mix will be archived on the programme’s page straight after broadcast and later on the Everyday ago mixcloud.

60S SPECIAL TRACKLIST
Michael Yonkers – Tripping Through The Rose Gardens
The 13th Floor Elevators – Don’t Fall Down
Cold Sun – Twisted Flower
Red Crayola – Hurricane Fighter Plane
Silver Apples – Oscillations
The Electric Prunes – I Had Too MuchTo Dream Last Night
Love – My Little Red Book
The Factory – Gone
Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera – Mother Writes
The Poets – Some Things I Can’t Forget
The Human Expression – Every Night
West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band – I Won’t Hurt You
The Troggs – Our Love Will Still Be There
The Zombies – Leave Me Be
Arthur Lee Harper- Open Up The Door
The Kinks – I Go To Sleep (Demo)
The Peep Show – Morning
The Factory – Path Through The Forest (Demo)
The 13th Floor Elevators – May The Circle Remain Unbroken
The Troggs – Love Is All Around
The Beatles – A Day In The Life