Colleen Interview (Continued)

One of the new album’s key themes is evanescence, the inevitable fading away of sights, sounds, and memories, an idea Schott returns to repeatedly in speaking of the “dying out” of an instrument’s tones. That such a pronounced Proustian quality pervades her music isn’t surprising, since she readily expresses deep affection for A La Recherche du Temps Perdu and even recites the French writer’s text in “La Lectrice” on Jorge Mantas’s Proust-inspired release as The Beautiful Schizophonic, Musicamorosa. (She has also contributed cello to Ultra Milkmaids’ Pocket Station and Library Tapes’ Feelings for Something Lost albums.)

The melancholy dimension at the core of her music also surfaced, albeit subtly, on Colleen et Les Boites a Musique. Though the music box referred to in the EP’s title might appear to be the most light-hearted of instruments, its association with childhood reveals a barely concealed melancholy, too; the instrument’s songs are like a paradise lost, reminding us of a childhood that we vaguely recall but can’t revive. “Sometimes you remember certain passages of your childhood-like, for instance, the joy of seeing something simple that really amazes you,” she says. “But when you dig deeper, you find lots of things that are disturbing and scary. So while the music box embodies lightness, it also references the fears we associate with childhood.

“The really interesting thing is that originally the radio commission for the EP included finding films (such as Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, a 1961 adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw) that contained music boxes. When the film excerpts were played in-between my pieces, what emerged were connections between the music boxes and things like murder, rape, guilt, and ghosts.”

Appearing at Mutek on a bill with Mark Templeton and Hauschka, Schott’s Colleen set brings into sharp relief the anomalous character of her approach. In contrast to Templeton’s multi-sensory dazzle of guitar washes and mutating projections, Schott appears alone, sans accompanying visuals. Moving unhurriedly from classical guitar to viol to clarinet, often cuing loops with her feet using three pedals (two for sampling and one for delay), Schott’s intimate and unaffected performance puts concertgoers at ease, making them feel like they’re guests in her home rather than in a stuffy concert hall. Even so, the casual informality of her onstage persona belies the confident deliberation she brings to the business at hand. Throughout the hour-long set, numerous moments of stirring beauty emerge, and when the music swells during the closing piece “Everything Lay Still,” the effect is mesmerizing. (One of the concert’s most arresting songs, a multi-layered clarinet piece with a jazz feel entitled “Serpentine,” didn’t make it onto the domestic release of Les Ondes Silencieuses but appears on the Japanese version.) The electronic dimension, generally downplayed on the new album, reasserts itself in this context as a necessary means for re-creating the layered quality of some pieces.

Schott recently collaborated with Swiss-French choreographer and dancer Perrine Valli on the contemporary dance work, Série. A May performance at the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris revealed a symbiotic connection between Valli’s choreography and Schott’s score, which is even more austere and stark than Les Ondes Silencieuses yet a natural complement to Valli’s solo performance. Typically, a single instrument—viol, piano, classical guitar, wind chimes, crystal glasses—dominated each of the work’s six pieces.

On a humid Friday afternoon the day after her Montreal show, our discussion returns a final time to the new album’s melancholy tone, a quality reinforced by vivid song titles like “This Place in Time.” “That title also was inspired by my trip to Japan,” Schott says. “We went to this amazing temple in the suburbs of Kyoto at about four in the afternoon, this place with lots of temples and bamboo forests. After watching a Buddhist ceremony, we went to this pavilion where there was a view on a garden, and when the sun started to set down, the effect was just amazing.

“’This Place in Time’ refers to the one moment in your life when you’re going to be in a particular place and time with the light a certain way, and the rush of emotion is something that never can be reproduced and so should be cherished.” A better description of Colleen’s magnificent music would be hard to imagine.

—Ron Schepper

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