Colleen
Les Ondes Silencieuses,
The Leaf Label, 2007
By Sal Hassanpour
Academic Cécile Schott has been composing small, minimalist pieces under the name Colleen for five years now. A typical track will feature a single instrument — music-box, classical guitar or clarinet — playing a melody that is deceptively simple. Colleen is all about subtle changes within sounds that at first seem haphazard or repetitive. Generally, a whole album will go by before you start to appreciate this, and that can be frustrating — or at least somewhat off-putting. Engaging with something like Colleen requires repeated listens and concentration, but anyone who likes The Books or some of the stranger Akron/Family moments will probably relish the challenge.
So let’s call Colleen “experimental,” already.
With her latest Colleen record, Les Ondes Silencieuses, Schott has addressed classical Western music — in other words, gone back to the origins of the acoustic-experimental genre. The album adds to the Colleen repertoire two baroque instruments, the viola da gamba (an early cello) and a spinet (a pocket-harpsichord); instruments that Schott has been teaching herself to play for the last year. When asked about them in an interview, she gushes about the culture of the professional classical performer, who travels hundreds of kilometres to find the right instrument or waits for years to have it made.
That obsessive element, a seemingly significant source of inspiration for Schott’s work, is actually absent in the final output. Colleen’s becoming less interested in pairing sounds together, and so Les Ondes Silencieuses is the most spare record to date: the title translates literally as “quiet waves” (but also refers to the type of pre-earthquake tremors that only animals seem to sense). The monotone compositions here keep with the aesthetic of her last release, 2006’s Et Les Boîtes à Musique EP, which was, as the title suggests, composed using only music-boxes.
Les Ondes Silencieuses explores resonance more than any other Colleen album: the instruments are recorded so closely that the listener will feel as if he has been shrunken to fit inside them. In ways, this “quiet wave” of an album is Colleen’s loudest. It is also a strong chapter in Colleen’s exploration of sound generation, one that sets her apart from the many other acoustic-improv-ambient-minimalists that she has thus far been associated with.
