colleen

“Hidden in the Current” is the closer of my new album The Tunnel and the Clearing, its sonic and emotional climax, with Hammond organ and oscillators from the Moog Grandmother joining forces through filtering and modulation: awakening to a hard but inevitable truth, owning it, and realizing that ultimately, all life experiences – positive and negative, joyful and painful – are “hidden in the current / Where all things grow / Even on their own” (full lyrics and list of gear at the end of this post).

But today I have the immense pleasure not just of sharing a new song with you, but also presenting an animation video which I think stands as a work of art in its own right. 

When I discovered Mexican artist Daniel Barreto’s work last year – and in particular his amazing animations –  I was just starting to record the album’s songs in their definitive versions, and I immediately sensed he’d be the perfect person to translate visually what I was trying to do sonically. I just didn’t know he would actually surpass my expectations. 

Please put on a pair of headphones or plug into a good amp and watch this in hi def on a good screen: I hope you will find the warmth of these colourful vibrations as moving and intoxicating as I do.

Gear list: Yamaha Reface YC into Moog Grandmother into MF-104M Analog Delay, vocals (single-tracked, then double-tracked) into MF-104M.

“I am waking

I finally woke up

And stood on my own

It was hidden in the current

Where all things flow

It was hidden in the current

Where all things go

It was hidden in the current

Where all things grow

Even on their own”

Given the seemingly unending pandemic, it is with great emotion and slight disbelief that I am announcing what seems impossible even to me: a real live show in London, in beautiful Kings Place, full capacity. The London audience has always had a soft spot in my heart: my largest audience in Europe, and one of the most enthusiastic too (I’ll never forget the show at St John’s on Bethnal Green in December 2017: I’d never seen an atmosphere like that in a church and even asked the audience if they’d been handed something illegal before entering, such was their cheerful attitude! :-))) So needless to say I will try to make this show as special as possible. Tickets and details here.

To illustrate this excellent news, what could be more appropriate than more excellent news? Luis Torroja has almost completed the editing of our minidocumentary on my new album The Tunnel and the Clearing, and here’s a tiny snippet for your pleasure, a section of the opening track “The Crossing”, featuring the Elka Drummer One and Space Echo.

Earlier this month, I also finally changed the tape of my beloved RE201 Space Echo: the tape it came with when I first got it in December 2019, the tape that accompanied me throughout the making of The Tunnel and the Clearing  and which I didn’t change *on purpose* even though it sounded used and tired – I felt the same way, and thought there couldn’t be a better symbol of what I was going through than to keep literally repeating with that tape.
After I finished the album, I felt a strange resistance to actually changing it, but I have finally done it… I’ll stop the talking and let the pics of those beautiful innards do the talking. In order of appearance from 2 onwards: old tape, tape “trajectory” details, new tape straight out of its box looking quite like a Yin/Yang symbol, then finally set up to run. It sounds beautiful 😃

In my life I’ve been lucky to live in three cities with which I fell in love: Liverpool, Paris and Barcelona. Three totally different stages of my life: young and inexperienced in Liverpool in 1998, then one of the fullest periods of my life in Paris from 1999 to 2010 – the years in which I trained to be a teacher and began to teach, started the Colleen project, then became a full-time musician. I had a great time in San Sebastían (2010-2019), but would say that it was not the town that I loved there, but the presence of nature on its edges – which is slightly different. I moved to Barcelona in 2019, and although I knew I would like it, I didn’t anticipate the role it would play in my truly awful 2020. A large part of my self-devised-and-administered therapy involved walking up and down the city with my eyes truly open, and I was rewarded 10,000-fold, often thinking “Barcelona truly is my friend, always there for me”. So much so that the album is dedicated to my friends, my cats, and the city.

Irrespective of location, I feel that Covid has reemphasized how essential human connections are to a sense of belonging and well-being, and once I completed The Tunnel and the Clearing it was clear to me that *somehow* I wanted to celebrate its release , no matter how modestly, even with Covid still around. It has been my good fortune to cross paths with some amazing people here, and Laura, who runs the Chiquita Room art gallery, is one of them – so when she asked me if I might be interested in doing some sort of event around the album’s release, my answer was a resounding SÍ. For the first time in my life I am given a public space for 3 full days, which is an incredible blessing, so we are preparing something small-scale but meaningful and beautiful. We are still working out details, not least because we do not know yet if we will have full capacity or a Covid-limited one, but I can already tell you that I will be there with my instruments, eager to share with you some of my process and to play you music, in a spirit of true closeness and exchange.

Also, time to show you here the limited edition gold and white vinyl of the new album: gold exclusively available through Thrill Jockey’s mail order (shipping from both the US and Germany) and my Bandcamp (shipping from the US only), white available while stocks last at online and physical stores.

Test pressings of my new album The Tunnel and the Clearing arrived this week, and they sound great, so fingers crossed that vinyl production will go without delay in spite of Covid making things even more lengthy and complicated at vinyl plants in the US. Here’s a snippet of the fist track from the album, “The Crossing”.

Yesterday the second single of the album was released.

Of my entire catalogue spanning 18 years, “Implosion-Explosion” is the track I’m proudest of in terms of production. “Gazing at Taurus – Santa Eulalia” was about holding on to a physical vision (the figure of Santa Eulalia at the top of Barcelona’s cathedral, and at night the Pleiades above it) to withstand intense sadness. “Implosion-Explosion” is the flipside of the same coin, going into an angry territory which I hadn’t had the chance to explore in my music before, which gives me a chance to tell you more about the album and that song in particular.
The Tunnel and the Clearing is a sonic translation of the highly emotional state and the heightened sense of perception that come in the wake of a breakup and a period of great changes, with the subsequent necessary reconstruction this entails. “Implosion-Explosion” is my attempt at expressing both the sensation of being completely “see-through” once out alone in the outside world, and the combined feelings of pain and anger at what cannot be changed. PLEASE LISTEN LOUDLY at Thrill Jockey’s mail order, my Bandcamp, or any other place you fancy.
TECH SPECS: @soundgasltd Elka Drummer One into Roland RE-201 Space Echo, Yamaha Reface YC into @moogsynthesizers Moog MF-101 Lowpass Filter and MF-104M Analog Delay, vocals doubletracked into MF-104M Analog Delay. No plugin.

This week I will have the immense pleasure of letting you know about something special we’re preparing with @chiquitaroom here in Barcelona for the album’s release, so keep your eyes peeled :-)

When I decided I would set up my studio at home again a couple of years ago, after 8 years of having a separate studio, I did not anticipate that the thing I would enjoy the most would be the ability to work late into the evening and at night. The more progress I made on the album, the more I spread the workload between afternoon and evening/night (to my cats’ utter dismay): it somehow just felt so right, making me reconnect with sensations I hadn’t felt since my early recordings in the 2000s.

I feel so fortunate that super talented photographer Luis Torroja has managed to capture the night atmosphere of my modest but beloved studio in such a brilliant way!!!

I’ve been a fan of voluntarily restricted setups since my 5th album Captain of None, as I find that fewer parametres actually widen my creativity, and this album is the most radical thing I’ve ever done: all the sounds you’ll hear were produced with only 6 pieces of gear (not counting my Soundcraft mixing desk and Scarlett soundcard), 5 of them analog (Elka Drummer One, Roland RE-201 Space Echo – both from Soundgas – , Moog Grandmother, MF-104M Analog Delay, MF-101 Lowpass Filter), 1 digital (Yamaha Reface YC, the main sound source on all songs, manipulated through the analog gear) + my voice. No digital plugin whatsoever was used. Digital intervention is purely and strictly restricted to a few edits (could count them on the fingers of my 2 hands) where takes needed to be joined (with the exception of vocals for which I did have to do a bit more “Frankensteining” due to being particularly nervous when recording these sessions).

Case in point, single “Gazing at Taurus – Santa Eulalia”: Yamaha Reface YC into Moog MF-104M Analog Delay, Elka Drummer One into Roland RE-201 Space Echo for a tiny bit of spring reverb. Vocals double-tracked with no FX.

You can preorder the album on the Thrill Jockey shop or on Bandcamp. As always thank you!

THANK YOU!!!