Take a look at the sonic landscape of club culture today and Colleen ‘Cosmo’ Murphy stands out as one of the pioneers on many fronts. Whether she’s dropping Cosmedelica remixes on her Love Dancin’ sound system at We Out Here festival, hosting listening sessions for her hugely influential Classic Album Sundays, or telling ‘Turntable Tales’ for BBC’s Radio 4, she has created new avenues for experiencing music and thinking deeply about how it affects us and our communities.

So here we are at Volume 5 of this series that once again captures Colleen’s unique take on Balearic. ‘Anger is Divisive’ runs the spoken word sample weaved into the pastoral ambience of ‘Quiet Storm’ from Sewell and The Gong’s Patron Saint Of Elsewhere on Chris Coco’s DSPPR label from 2025. It’s a fitting opening to a collection put together with and for love.

Born from the same lockdown isolation as Balearic Breakfast, ‘Fruits of Life’ from Sakura Murakami’s 2020 album Hot Liquor offers a Tiki flavoured cocktail of tropical psychedelia. Digging deeper into her crates, Colleen then uncovers Flayer’s ‘Wanna Get Back Your Love’, a slow and sleazy piece of cosmic soul from Italy in 1983.

Richard Earnshaw’s ‘Rise’, featuring Roy Ayers and spoken word artist Ursula Rucker, was hidden away on his only album from 2019. This slow jazz infused groover proves to be the perfect segue record as the collection hits the dancefloor with the Spiritual Life style deepness of ‘Ore Yeye O’ by Moroccan house producer Cee ElAssaad and vocalist QVLN (Quetzal Guerrero).

We then return to spoken word with Joshua Idehen’s diasporic club anthem ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’. You’re in it deep now, head down next to the speakers as The Seven Ups bring you ‘A Cosmic Scale’, a heavy slab of psych rock meets afrobeat by way of Melbourne. We then take a trip over to Sheffield where Richard Barratt under his Crooked Man alias reunites with his dance music subverters All Seeing I for a wonderfully skewed mutant disco classic.

Bringing things down gently with the sun kissed ‘80s soul of Lovetempo ft Wattison’s ‘Wanna Be With You’ (ft. Mattison) out of Brooklyn, Colleen eases into the perfect exit to her eclectic journey with Santana drummer Michael Shrieve joined by Kevin Shrieve and the great Klaus Schulze for the Berlin new age cosmic epic from 1984 ‘Transfer Station Blue’.

Music for the head and feet brought to you with love by one of our masters of sonics and selection.

TRACK LISTING

1. Sewell & The Gong - Quiet Storm (Ruf Dug Remix)
2.Sakura Murakami - Fruits of Life
3. Flayer - Wanna Get Back Your Love (Extended Mix)
4. Richard Earnshaw - Rise ft. Ursula Rucker & Roy Ayers
5. Cee ElAssaad & QVLN - Ore Yeye O (Doug Gomez Remix)
6. Joshua Idehen - Everything Everywhere All At Once (Cosmodelica Extended Mix)
7. The Seven Ups - A Cosmic Scale (Cosmodelica Remix)
8. The All Seeing I - The Return of the Crooked Cat (Crooked Man Mix)
9. Lovetempo - Wanna Be With You (Turbotito Remix)
10. Michael Shrieve - Transfer Station Blue

TRACK LISTING

1Mis Armas Se Habian Caido Al Suelo
2Puertas De Mi Cuerpo
3Antidoto
4Aguas Abiertas
5Libres Antes Del Final

Colleen Green has always been cool, but on 2015’s I Want To Grow Up, she didn’t necessarily feel it. Too young to be free of insecurities but old enough to be sick of them running her life, Green was experiencing an existential crisis. Five years and a new album later, we find her parsing out what it means to be grown-up—and realizing that it’s actually pretty cool.

Opener “Someone Else” is a paean to power in which Green lets a lover know that double standards can go both ways. A groovy bass loop and zig-zagging guitar lines underscore her realization that happiness is in her own hands, and the vibe is set. Next up is the witty, catchy “I Wanna Be A Dog,” where Green celebrates the simplicity of a canine life and questions why she’s still overcomplicating her own. Dark and slinky “Highway” uses ruthless driving as a metaphor for a lifestyle that no longer interests her.

Burnt out on bad feelings and ready to have fun with melodies and beats, Green enlisted producer Gordon Raphael (The Strokes) to take her songs to higher ground while keeping her lo-fi aesthetic intact. Raphael was already a fan, having caught a show in L.A. and finding himself “struck by how confident and powerful she looked, even though she was the only one onstage.”

He agreed to take the gig, and together with drummer Brendan Eder and hip hop producer Aqua over a few weeks in Los Angeles, Cool was created. The album’s themes come together on the anthemic “It’s Nice to Be Nice,” Green’s reminder to herself that you get what you give, so it’s important to try and be the best person you can—a hard-won but essential lesson in the emotional maturity that defines Cool.

TRACK LISTING

Someone Else
I Wanna Be A Dog
Posi Vibes
Highway
Natural Chorus
You Don't Exist
It's Nice To Be Nice
How Much Should You Love A Husband?
I Believe In Love
Pressure To Cum

Colleen is an aboundingly inventive composer and artist. For two decades Cécile Schott, as Colleen, has crafted welcoming, enchanting, and bewildering music. The multiinstrumentalist and vocalist’s timeless compositions make use of carefully selected tools to mold memories into transcendent splendor. The Tunnel and the Clearing finds Schott at her most vulnerable and confident, invoking contemplative and swirling organ processed through analog electronics, steady drum machine syncopations and her distinctive voice. On an album centered 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.

Colleen’s albums are unified by distinct and personal instrumentation, built around music boxes, viola da gamba, or electronics, they somehow all remarkably share a dreamlike modern quality. For The Tunnel and the Clearing Schott restricted herself to using analog electronic instruments including the Elka Drummer One, the Roland RE-201 Space Echo and Moog Grandmother synth, coupled with Yamaha organ keyboard. Stunningly, Colleen achieves the rich emotional intricacy and the lush density of textures on The Tunnel and the Clearing through almost entirely live performance and processing. These detailed and affecting compositions mirror Colleen’s grappling with her own psyche. Schott elaborates “I found direct correspondences between my internal discourse, its obsessive, frantic attempts at making sense of what I could not understand, and the music I was making, with motifs functioning as questions and answers, doubts and assertions.” Clicks, hums, warbles and throbs emulating our evolving internal worlds, an “emotional noise.” A musical journey through the tunnel toward the clearing at its end. The Tunnel and the Clearing is a work of lucid reverence, a constellation of marvels suspended in air.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A beautifully produced juxtaposition of Space Lady-esque echoing vocal shards and slowly pulled organ swells, flickering drum machines and psychedelic reverb, 'The Tunnel..' is both brilliantly propulsive and warmingly lysergic, ending up somewhere between an arm-waving midday festival slot and loose, chillout room ambience. Really lovely stuff.

TRACK LISTING

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

Growing up.
As a prospect it can be terrifying, sad, and worst of all, inevitable. But on I Want to Grow Up, her second album for Hardly Art, Colleen Green lets us know that we don't have to go it alone.

This latest collection of songs follows a newly 30-year-old Green as she carefully navigates a minefield of emotion. Her firm belief in true love is challenged by the inner turmoil caused by entering modern adulthood, but that doesn't mean that her faith is defeated. With a nod to her heroes, sentimental SoCal punks The Descendents, Green too wonders what it will be like when she gets old. Throughout songs such as "Some People," "Deeper Than Love," and the illustrative title track, the listener has no choice but to feel the sympathetic growing pains of revelatory maturation and the anxieties that come along with it.

Sonically the album is a major change for the LA-based songwriter, who has come to be known for her homemade recordings and merchandise. Her past offerings have been purely Green; testaments to her self-sufficiency and, perhaps, trepidation. This time, she's got a little help from her friends: the full band heard here includes JEFF the Brotherhood's Jake Orrall and Diarrhea Planet's Casey Weissbuch, who collaborated with Green over ten days at Sputnik Sound in Nashville, TN.

I Want to Grow Up is an experience, not unlike life: questioning, learning, taking risks. And in true CG fashion, a quote from a beloved 90s film seems the perfect summation: "Understanding is reached only after confrontation."

TRACK LISTING

1. I Want To Grow Up
2. Wild One
3. TV
4. Pay Attention
5. Deeper Than Love
6. Things That Are Bad For Me (Part I)
7. Things That Are Bad For Me (Part II)
8. Some People
9. Grind My Teeth
10. Whatever I Want