In order to dedicate all her time to figuring out how to make music with her first production software program, Colleen (Cécile Schott) abandoned a perfectly good job as a teacher at a French high school. Just last year, she mastered pottery; this too she abandoned. Her ceramics are very beautiful, like her compositions – both minimalist objects of fragile intricacy with a lot of space at the center. A large part of her musical labor was the painstaking task of recreating her compositions live with acoustic instruments, so the last few years have been understandably spent taking a break and figuring out what to do next musically.
Colleen was bracketed as an electronic artist in the aughts because she used looping pedals and software that blended samples from her own record collection. Her first record was basically an expert collage of her no doubt lovingly curated vinyl collection. I like to think that fans of the itunes genre tag mis-assigned Colleen’s style completely (it was known to happen back then). Her old vinyl record collection perhaps was the unusual musical instrument that made her first album, rather than the invisible computer program that marked her out as an electronic artist.
This is a woman who made a 14 track EP using music boxes (Colleen et les Boîtes à Musique), and spoke of the pleasure she derived from reviving the sounds of the viola da gamba. By Les Ondes Silenceuses, the samples were gone altogether and replaced with acoustic instruments. Even the loops were less evident. “Echoes and Coral” was a track that explored the unusual perfection of struck crystal glasses. Other instruments used on the record were the spinet (a form of harpsichord), classical guitar, and clarinet.
The album has the feel early recorded music – an alternative to classical music in the early twentieth century, and almost as much of an underground obsession as experimental and electronic music for adventurous collectors (the impetus for the founding of the Nonesuch label, in fact). In Colleen’s career electronic music seems to have flowed back out again, to the still waters – Les Ondes Silenceuses – of her most recent record, which explores the sonic possibilities of forgotten acoustic instruments.
There is an Indonesian word for a group of instruments that are tuned to be played together and are rarely played separately. One of Colleen’s songs is called “Gamelan” after this term. Of course I searched the internet expecting to find an exotic, individual instrument crafted from the fine hairs of an Asian breed of rabbit (not precisely, but you get my drift). Les Ondes Silenceuses sounds like it was made for a gamelan. In many ways the album’s compositions are the sum of their instruments – their voices, their possibilities, their melancholy. It will be interesting to see whether Colleen will continue to explore the experimental possibilities of older, acoustic instruments on her next record, or whether she will dust off her electronic tools again. Either way, the result will no doubt sound as if this selection was the final one.
