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COLLEEN

Colleen

Le Jour Et La Nuit Du Réel

    Colleen’s mastery of the art of sound sculpting is fully displayed on Le jour et la nuit du réel, a beautiful 21 song double album that manages to explore the intersections of the material and the imagined, a sonic odyssey unearthing soul from synthesis. The album is organized into several movements. Each movement employs different synthesis settings, but with distinctive chords and motifs that provide a through line, guiding the listener through gorgeous sonic landscapes. Schott elaborates: “To me, the capacity of synthesis to alter - subtly or radically - the physical embodiment in sound of the same series of notes is akin to how, when given new information about a person or a situation, we can reevaluate our initial perception of what we thought was the “reality” of that person or situation, sometimes drastically so”.

    TRACK LISTING

    1-3. Subterranean - Movement I,II,III
    4-5. The Long Wait - Movement I,II
    6-7. To Hold And To Be Held - Movement I,II
    8-10. Mon Coeur - Movement I,II,III
    11-13. Be Without Being Seen - Movement I,II,III
    14-17. Les Parenthèses Enchantées - Movement I,II,III,IV
    18. Les Parenthèses Enchantées - Epilogue
    19-21. Night Looping - Movement I,II,III

    Colleen Green

    Cool

      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

      The Tunnel And The Clearing

        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

        Colleen Green

        I Want To Grow Up

          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

          Five years after her previous widely - acclaimed album, 'Les Ondes Silencieuses', Cécile Schott (aka Colleen), returns with a stunning new opus maximus, 'The Weighing of the Heart' - her first for Second Language.

          Singing for the first time on record, and to dazzling, numinous effect, the dexterous Spain-based Frenchwoman deploys violas da gamba, guitar, woodwind and Moondog-inspired percussion across a litany of finely wrought tableaux vivant songs. The combined influences of Arthur Russell, Moondog, Brigitte Fontaine and the musics of the African continent loom large in her new work, an absorbing fusion of the delicately spun and the rhythmically persuasive, embracing a pastoralism that is both lyrical yet rooted to the earth; at once hazily baroque yet accessible and universal.

          Colleen has released three albums on The Leaf Label, and also released a live recording in the Mort Aux Vaches series on Staalplaat in 2006, and an EP made entirely with music boxes (the result of a commission by national French radio station France Culture) in October of that year. In 2007 she also completed her first dance score for Franco-Swiss choreographer and dancer Perrine Valli.

          Both the CD and 180gram vinyl are packaged in beautiful artwork by the renowned Italian illustrator, Iker Spozio. The gatefold vinyl includes a free mp3 download code of all the tracks from the album plus an 8 page lyric booklet. The CD is the 4th in the highly-collectible Second Language Library Series - beautifully designed CD albums in hardback book - style packaging.

          TRACK LISTING

          01. Push The Boat Onto The Sand
          02. Ursa Major Find
          03. Geometría Del Universo
          04. Humming Fields
          05. Break Away
          06. Going Forth By Day
          07. The Moon Like A Bell
          08. Raven
          09. Moonlit Sky
          10. Breaking Up The Earth
          11. The Weighing Of The Heart


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