Colleen - The Tunnel and the Clearing (OPAQUE WHITE VINYL)

21.5.21 - LTD. OPAQUE WHITE VINYL LP

Colleen is an aboundingly inventive composer and artist. For two decades Cécile Schott, as Colleen, has crafted welcoming, enchanting, and bewildering music. The multi-instrumentalist and vocalist's timeless compositions make use of carefully selected tools to mould memories into transcendent splendour. The Tunnel and the Clearing finds Schott at her most vulnerable and confident, invoking contemplative and swirling organ processed through analogue electronics, steady drum machine syncopations and her distinctive voice. On an album cantered on processing the complicated washes of emotion through tribulations and revelations Colleen presents a vision of breathless clarity.

The Tunnel and the Clearing was developed over a period of transformative change. Colleen began work on the album in 2018 but was all but halted by extreme fatigue from a previously undiagnosed illness. Years of treatment and adjustment eventually led to relocating to Barcelona, soon followed by lockdowns and then the dissolution of her longtime partnership. Reflecting on these cumulative experiences she reimagined her compositional practices, spending months in near complete silence. Says Schott, “Never before had I felt so profoundly the power that music has, through harmony, melody, rhythm and sound itself, to express the whole range of human emotions." The resulting seven pieces investigate the complex, at times contradictory relationship between excitement and fear, anger and understanding, struggle and triumph, all focused on a reconstruction of the self.

Tracklist:

1. The Crossing
2. Revelation
3. Implosion-Explosion
4. The Tunnel and the Clearing
5. Gazing at Taurus - Santa Eulalia
6. Gazing at Taurus - Night Sky Rumba
7. Hidden in the Current