COLLEEN
Photo by Luis Torroja, courtesy of Thrill Jockey
Indie chanteuse
Interview by Brett Abrahamsen
(June 2024)
Colleen is one of the most intriguing composers of the 21st century. She began with the surreal Everyone Alive Wants Answers (2003), an abstract and often mesmerizing work highlighted by the trance-like "A Swimming Pool Down The Railway Track". Her next album, The Golden Morning Breaks, was arguably her masterpiece. Album opener "Summer Water" remains the highlight of her entire career: an otherworldly hymn of nostalgia that sounds like watching the sun rise over a medieval palace. Les Ondes Silencieuses followed in a similar vein. Then, following a lengthy hiatus, she re-emerged as a completely different artist: The Weighing of the Heart was much more focused on vocals and conventional song structure than on meandering electroacoustic symphonies. The varied Captain of None followed. She then released the majestic (albeit rather minimalist) A flame my love a frequency, whose standout track was probably "Winter Dawn." This piece seamlessly melds all of the phases of her career: the minimalist electronic composer, the experimenter of strange medieval sounding instruments, the dream-pop chanteuse. In 2021, she released The Tunnel and the Clearing, featuring the powerful, galactic, keyboard-driven symphonic grandeur of "Revelation". Her most recent release (Le jour et la nuit du réel) is one of her most austere and ambitious works, but also capable of the poignancy of the early days ("Night looping"). The theme of her entire career has been eclecticism: she's even flirted with noise-rock and plans to make an album of dance-pop in the near future. Despite the varied stylistic shifts, the quality level has generally remained high, and The Golden Morning Breaks may well someday be remembered as one of the best albums of the 2000's.
PSF: On your website, you mention Tim Buckley, Van Morrison, and Joanna Newsom among your favorite musicians. I can hear their influences in your music, but also various others. Which musician has influenced you the most?
C: Well, you picked 3 names out of hundreds, and these lists are really old, from the mid-2000s mostly. They were originally just personal documents to keep track of albums and songs I was listening to, then I just decided to publish them in case other people could enjoy the music mentioned, some of which was pretty obscure, and I still have them online under the "My favorite things" section of my website.
In terms of influences, I have listened to so many genres of music over the years, from so many continents and time periods, so many musicians, that by now I feel that it's the sum total of those influences, digested over the course of more than 25 years, which is now a backdrop, both conscious and subconscious, when I create. For example, Arthur Russell was a massive influence for several years, I can even credit his music for putting me back on track after a tough hiatus in 2008-2009, but I haven't listened to his music in a pretty long time because in a way it's now part of me and has sort of "played the role" it was supposed to play in my development.
There are also musicians who inspire me in a more general way, almost on a "philosophical" level, such as Coltrane. And from a purely technical point of view, without a doubt, Lee Perry is my strongest influence.
I also occasionally get flashes these days, when listening to specific music genres, of how important these genres were to me at the time of creating certain records, for instance with hip-hop and my first album Everyone Alive Wants Answers. GZA's "Liquid Swords" had a massive impact on me in the late 90s when I first heard it along with other seminal hip hop albums of that era.
Terry Riley's Poppy Nogood and the Canaxis 5 album [by Holger Czukay] are also deep roots which I think still permeate the music I make today, because - like [GZA's] Liquid Swords actually - they transcend the barriers of acoustic/electric/electronic and played/sampled/looped music. They also happen to be both very experimental - literally in the techniques that they used - and melodic at the same time - two qualities I try to unite in my music. Even though I haven't technically looped my music since 2017's A Flame my love, a frequency, this feeling of a running pulse, something that you can shake your head to, is fundamental in what I do.
PSF: My favorite song of yours is "Summer Water." It is a very unique song - nothing else sounds like it. Can you tell us about its genesis, recording, how you came up with the title, your feelings about the piece, etc.?
C: I also still love "Summer water" very much, and in fact my second album The Golden Morning Breaks, for which it is the opener, might be the album I would choose if someone totally new to my music - and perhaps not a listener of very experimental music - were to ask me "pick an album of yours for me to listen to."
I have extremely strong memories of creating this album, for many reasons. It was a really pivotal point in my life on all levels. I had been totally taken by surprise by the recognition that my first album had received in 2003: releasing it literally changed my life, because I started to play live, in parallel to teaching English in a high school in the Paris suburbs, which I had started to do in 2001. I had to juggle between this teaching job, which was very demanding in terms of public transport (3 hours a day, 4 days a week), playing live, doing promotion, finding out about the administrative realities of this new musical activity, and of course making a second album.
From the start, I realized my first album was unplayable live, as I did not want to use a computer on stage, but this proved to be beneficial, as by then I had also "exhausted" my desire to sample on a computer. What I did want was to start playing acoustic instruments and sample them live with looping pedals, which were really getting popular at that time, and go through delay pedals. Everything gelled, as the money from teaching enabled me to both start acquiring those instruments and pedals *and* move to a new flat, in which I finally had a bit more space to make music.
It was also an incredible time to go and see live shows, as well as listen to music on radio shows, public music libraries (I was still raiding their collections and burning CDr's like crazy), record shops and peer-to-peer platforms like Soulseek. In terms of the album's recording, technically, I was extremely limited both in my knowledge of how to record instruments and in the actual gear at my disposal, but somehow this combination of two negatives enabled me to land on a very specific sound which I think really defines this album: almost everything is recorded with homemade contact mikes which friends made for me, goes through my main looping pedal (Boss RC20) and delay (Akai Headrush and Line6 Delay), then went through a cheap Behringer desk, itself going through a super cheap M-Audio interface. I then assembled everything on the Acid software, using its plugins, and through this combination of pedal delays and plugin delays, as well as pitching, reversing, and other methods strongly inspired by my beginnings on a 4-track Fostex tape recorder, I achieved the warm sound of the album. The song title was part of a developing obsession with water and the idea of a liquid quality to sound.
PSF: Which album of yours are you most proud of? Do you feel that there have been any missteps in your career/songs you released that you no longer think have artistic value or weren't fully developed?
C: My personal favorite is Captain of None on all levels, but I am also really happy with the depth and width of sounds and compositions on the last one, Le jour et la nuit du réel. Then I would choose The Golden Morning Breaks for being such a warm album and The Tunnel and the Clearing for the amount of cathartic emotion that went into it.
Beyond any qualities that I find or fail to find in my own output, I try to never lose sight of the fact that all the albums that I've made are the exact result of who I was at the time of recording, both as a person and as a musician- therefore, they are the exact expression of what I had within me emotionally and mentally, expressed through the purely musical and technical abilities that were mine at the time. And because I tend to learn new instruments for each album, yes, there are definitely limitations that I can hear in most of my albums. But I think it is part and parcel of who I am as a musician - if it was more "pristine," then it wouldn't be me in the first place.
There are 2 albums which for me contain technical flaws, for which I take full responsibility: on 2007's Les ondes silencieuses, I got help to record the album (the only album for which that happened), as recording Baroque instruments is definitely not easy and cannot be done with cheap gear, and I think that my idea of a modern baroque music album was sincerely what I hoped to achieve, but my shortcomings as a musician (I started to take viola da gamba lessons a mere 10 months before recording!) make this album less accomplished than what I would have liked it to be.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, my first electronic album, 2017's A flame my love, a frequency, sounds too narrow to my ears, and I think I lacked experience in purely electronic music to hear it at the time.
However, I have recently met listeners who have surprised me by choosing these albums as their favourites, and the funny thing is that some classically trained musicians have chosen Les ondes - meaning that they don't find it unaccomplished from a technical point of view - and some electronic musicians trained in engineering have chosen A flame - meaning that they clearly don't find it a failure from a sonic point of view! So now I accept that those works are what they are, and that perhaps in my own criticism I fail to see their more accomplished sides.
PSF: You were a guitarist in a noise pop band in high school, prior to venturing solo as Colleen. Has any of that band's output been released? What did you think of their music?
C: This was a time (1994) when even recording a proper-sounding demo was a massive endeavour, so no, nothing was ever truly released. I would say that this band allowed 3 things for me: to step into my identity as a musician and realize this was something that transformed me both internally and externally, to realize I loved playing live, and to realize almost as quickly that both my motivation and refusal to compromise creatively were so strong that I was meant to work on my own.
PSF: Your music is often otherworldly. Is there a spiritual component? What are your spiritual beliefs?
C: This is a really hard one to answer. For years, I dreaded the word "spiritual," but with the passing of time, I am starting to become ok with it and to realize that it can cover many realities that are not necessarily religiously or new-agey tinted.
However, I would better describe my interests as human-oriented, in the sense of being fascinated by the psychological aspects of our lives, and specifically the topic of how much - or little - we are in control of these psychological aspects. This interest stems directly from growing up with a very conflictive brother, who ended up taking his own life at the age of 21, an experience which had a huge impact on me.
So to go back to your question, I have developed an interest in Buddhism, but the aspect of Buddhism that interests me the most is precisely the incredibly spot-on description of the psychological roots of suffering and the description of the human psyche in general.
In any case, if by "otherworldly" you mean that my music communicates something that cannot be described or explained in words, I take that as a great compliment, and I think the great power of music is that each person can find a special meaning in what they hear, echoing their own emotional world, the current facts of their life at the moment of listening -this is what creates the strongest listener/record relationship, and it doesn't happen always or often, so I am always happy when people tell me about a special connection to a specific album or song of mine.
PSF: You have a penchant for unpredictability. Where do you want to go next?
C: I would like to finally make my project of a danceable (yes, you read that right) album come true: in 2019-20, I was hoping to make that album with the help of my newly acquired Elka Drummer One drum machine, but my plans were derailed by serious life events which led me to make a completely different album, The Tunnel and the Clearing.
When I started work on the next album, which became Le jour et la nuit du réel, in the summer of 2021, I ended up with so many different ideas that it became a tentacular album full of different directions and emotions.
But now the time is right and unless something strongly derails my plan, I will make the album with just one synth, the paraphonic Moog Matriarch, and try to focus on this idea of a flowing, rhythmical, bodily feel. I am really looking forward to getting down to it, and then playing it live, because I've massively enjoyed playing with a fully electronic instrumental set up live, and this would take things up one notch further!
Photo by Luis Torroja, courtesy of Thrill Jockey
