Grooves Magazine - Colleen Interview

Colleen

So your ravishing music and uncompromising vision are regularly celebrated, your first albums are fixtures on multiple year-end best-of lists, and your reputation continues to grow in the wake of European, US, and Japanese tours. What do you do next? If you’re Parisienne Cecile Schott (who records as Colleen), you issue a third album, Les Ondes Silencieuses, comprised of sparse clarinet, spinet, classical guitar, and viola da gamba settings. Schott’s no contrarian, however, as calculated strategizing isn’t her style. She’s merely doing what comes naturally, letting her muse dictate the latest stage in her remarkably rapid artistic evolution.

Schott’s auspicious Colleen debut, the sample-based 2003 release Everyone Alive Wants Answers (beginning her long-term association with the Leaf label), served immediate notice of her unique sensibility and artistic potential. Released two years later, The Golden Morning Breaks solidified her reputation and showed a dramatic advance in approach, with Schott playing much of the album’s music herself. Other notable releases include last year’s live contribution to Staalplaat’s Mort Aux Vaches series and the wonderful EP, Colleen et Les Boites a Musique. Calling Les Ondes Silencieuses a breakthrough of sorts isn’t inaccurate. Its electronic dimension verges on the inaudible but, more importantly, Schott’s music now sounds purer than before, with many pieces devoted to single instruments only. Though it defies easy description, the deceptively unassuming and oft-beautiful album impresses as a near-perfect realization of the Colleen aesthetic.

In fact, the album brings to fruition a journey begun over 15 years ago when Schott saw Tous les Matins du Monde, a film about the17th-century viola da gamba (or viol) player and composer Marin Marais. Schott was so bewitched by the instrument’s sound—bowed like a cello but with seven strings and fretted like a guitar—that, in 2005, she commissioned a viola maker to create one for her. “When I first heard it, I was really struck by the viol’s great acoustic qualities,” says Schott during a stay in Montreal for a performance at this year’s Mutek festival. “I thought that perhaps even more beautiful than the sound the viol makes is the sound that remains after you’ve stopped bowing—all the harmonics that linger in the air. Once I heard that, I knew I had to find a way to capture the sound and make it part of my music.”

The viol’s deep groan resonates in five of the nine pieces of Les Ondes Silencieuses; it’s bowed during the somber overture “This Place in Time,” bowed and plucked in “Past the Long Black Land,” and layered extensively on “Blue Sands,” where Schott bows, finger picks, and hits the viol with percussion mallets. Admittedly, Schott’s no virtuoso—her clarinet playing during the wistful “Sun Against My Eyes,” for example, won’t give Richard Stoltzman sleepless nights—but her music’s not about bravura displays. There’s an unadorned and unaffected charm to the basic technique she brings to her playing that’s more than adequate for communicating the emotional essence of the material.

Maintaining a MySpace page means that Schott needed to include a descriptive label for her music, so she opted for “minimal acoustic” as perhaps the least inaccurate characterization, purposefully omitting the word “electronic.” “I wanted the word ’acoustic’ because it’s important to me to associate that word with my sound, and I used minimal to explain the fact that it’s not pop but not contemporary, either,” she says. “I use the term ’minimal’ as a general aesthetic, and it’s particularly fitting for this new album because it’s more minimal than anything I’ve ever done.” She’s relatively sanguine about the “classical” label that her use of Baroque instrumentation invites. “There’s always confusion about the term classical because it can mean so many different things,” Schott says. “Whether you’re talking about music from the Middle Ages or Stravinsky or Stockhausen or Mozart, they’re all periods of classical music. It’s always a dangerous term to use; I was very careful to not do a ’neo-Baroque pastiche’ or something like that. Still, the term classical used here would be misleading.”

An enhanced sensitivity to space and to a note’s lingering resonance also distinguish the new album from its predecessors. It’s exploited on “Echoes and Coral” where the crystal glasses’ tones stretch out and slowly fade away. “That particular tune—which is quite a bit different from the others—makes me think of last fall’s Japan trip where the beauty of small things made such an impact,” says Schott. “That track also makes me think of a trip to the moon or something; on the other hand, I made the reference to coral because it makes me think of a trip underwater. In addition, when I attended a gamelan performance about two years ago in Paris, the performance began with this really large gong strike and hearing all the reverberations that remained afterwards was a powerful shock that stayed with me long after.

“Taking lessons in Baroque music taught me to pay more attention to musical phrases. My music before was this kind of thing that rolled forward, and left little space for silence; I came to realize the beauty in playing something and letting it die, and then starting something else as a continuity and having that breathing space. The advantage of not working with a looping aesthetic is that if you play in a more minimal way without looping yourself, either on the computer or with some pedals, then you can let the notes and melody expire and then take it to an entirely different place musically and melodically.”