French artist Cécile Schott aka Colleen is fearless in her willingness to explore new sounds and new ways of creating music as a solo performer. Over the course of seven critically acclaimed albums released between 2003 and 2021, Cécile Schott consistently reinvented herself, first by taking acoustic instruments out of their usual context and pushing the boundaries of their playability, then through avant-pop electronic explorations.

With compositions ranging from the mysterious and contemplative to kinetic and playful, the Thrill Jockey recording artist has given more than 230 concerts across Europe, the US, Japan, Brazil and Singapore, in prestigious venues and festivals  such as Moogfest, Big Ears, Mutek, Transmediale, Villette Sonique, Rewire and many more.

From 2003 to 2007, she released three albums on The Leaf Label (Everyone Alive Wants Answers in 2003, The Golden Morning Breaks in 2005 and Les Ondes Silencieuses in 2007).

After a break from recording and touring, Colleen returned with The Weighing of the Heart, using her voice for the first time and introducing a modified treble viola da gamba.

The artist then released a string of albums for Thrill Jockey Records: 2015’s Captain of None in 2015, noticed for its daring use of viola da gamba in other-worldly pop songs incorporating dub-inspired techniques, 2017’s A flame my love, a frequency, which heralded a shift to a purely electronic setup, and 2021’s The Tunnel and the Clearing, produced in the aftermath of a profound personal crisis: vintage drum machine, organ, Moog synthesizer, her voice and her beloved Moogerfoogers and Space Echo tape delay united to create “an emotional noise” in her most harmonically complex record to date.

Colleen’s growing passion for synthesis, bolstered by her collaborations with synth manufacturer Moog, have led to her 8th album Le jour et la nuit du réel, to be released on Thrill Jockey on September 22nd, 2023. Built as a suite of songs, the artist’s first double album is also her first purely instrumental work since 2007, and aims to translate through a myriad of sound transformations the complexity of our relation to reality, and its psychological mutations through the cycles of day and night.

Talento cristallino, artista in stato di grazia e dallo stile unico e personale, il canadese Eric Chenaux negli ultimi dieci anni ha rivoluzionato il mondo e il senso del songwriting di matrice jazz: i suoi dischi affrontano la relazione tra struttura e improvvisazione, in modi molto particolari e unici, senza cinismo ma con amore. Perché in fondo quelle di Chenaux sono canzoni d’amore, che canta con voce dolce e limpida, mentre la chitarra si piega delicatamente, diverge e scompone. A dispetto di un'innegabile vena iconoclasta, la sua musica rimane meravigliosamente calda, generosa e in ultima istanza accessibile. La giustapposizione tra crooning morbido e vellutato e le esplorazioni sperimentali della chitarra apre a nozioni inedite di accompagnamento e canto e a forme non convenzionali di interplay timbrico e tonale. Il suo è un suonare la chitarra attorno e contro la voce, improvvisando “con se stesso” allo scopo di catturare momenti di interdipendenza imprevisti e intimi. Un gioioso abbandono allo spazio improvviso e improvvisativo in cui gioco e leggerezza vengono presi molto sul serio.

Da qualche anno Eric vive in Francia, ma è stato un caposaldo della musica DIY e sperimentale a Toronto negli anni ‘90 e 2000, leggenda del post-punk locale con Phleg Camp (assolutamente da recuperare se amate gli Shellac) e Lifelikeweeds. Dal 2006 incide per Constellation Records: una discografia geniale che spazia dal folk più avventuroso, sontuoso, languoroso e decostruito, al jazz, fino a ballate di influenza pop. Eric compone anche colonne sonore e musica per la danza, e collabora regolarmente con altri artisti: tra di essi Marla Hlady, con la quale ha realizzato numerose installazioni sonore, e il regista Eric Cazdyn, con cui ha realizzato il film "Play the Cube" nel 2014. Ha fatto inoltre parte della band del musicista canadese Sandro Perri partecipando a vari suoi album, e ha suonato, tra gli altri, con Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, Martin Armold, Pauline Oliveros, John Oswald, Michael Snow, Han Bennink, Michael Moore, ecc.

"Delights of my life" è il nuovo, recentissimo, album di Chenaux (Constellation, maggio 2024), pubblicato a nome dell'Eric Chenaux Trio (info sotto). E' il seguito di "Say Laura" (2021)  acclamato dalla critica (secondo miglior disco del 2022 per la rivista Blow Up) e dell'ancora precedente "Slowly Paradise" (2018), altro capolavoro, che gli era valso (tra le altre cose) la copertina di The Wire.

Delights Of My Life opens a new chapter for the singer/guitarist and formally introduces the Eric Chenaux Trio, with Toronto-based musicians Ryan Driver on Wurlitzer organ and Phillipe Melanson on electronic percussion. Driver is a longtime collaborator, appearing on several of Chenaux’s solo albums (even embedded into the very title of the 2010 masterpiece Warm Weather With Ryan Driver). Melanson has a long list of involvements that include Bernice, Joseph Shabason, and U.S Girls, and a recent release with his Impossible Burger project on Chenaux’s own experimental label Rat-drifting, but this marks the first fulsome involvement between the two as players on a recording.

In many ways Delights Of My Life also picks up right where Chenaux’s previous album left off, in its subversions of a classic, timeless jazz-inflected balladry, while the interplay of the trio formation indeed unfurls many new delights. Recording together at Chenaux’s spartan home studio in rural France, Driver’s harmonically warped organ and Melanson’s electroacoustic sampling and percussion hold time in newfound ways. Where previously Chenaux relied on a freeze/sustain pedal and minimalist rhythmic triggers to generate both pulse and chordal foundations, Melanson now paints timekeeping with expressive and intricate colourations, through live deployments of fluid sampled percussion (including orchestral timbres like timpani, kettle drums, and woodblock) that blur the boundaries between acoustic and electronic. Driver also ramps up his role in the song arrangements (prefigured in his support playing on Say Laura), teasing out chords and melodic filigree on Wurlitzer that percolate more prominently with Chenaux’s signature fried guitar solos and succulent singing. Both trio members add dulcet backing vocals, most notably on the 10-minute tour-de-force of fuzzed and ring-modulated swing “This Ain’t Life” that opens the record. All seven songs on the album groove and sway, simmer and sparkle, like nothing in the inestimable Chenaux discography to date.

Chenaux’s tunes have the uncanny ability to sound like jazz standards; songs you feel you’ve heard before, though certainly never quite like this. Yet these are of course all originals, compositionally and interpretively, bent through an inimitable avant/out-music lens. Delights Of My Life conveys warm familiarity, shot through with the exuberantly experimental subversion and playful, even mischievous, iconoclasm that continues to mark Chenaux as defiantly, virtuosically, and genially one-of-kind.

intervista su Ondarock

foto da scaricare qui

Video

This ain't life (da "Delights of my life")

These things (da "Delights of my life")

Say Laura (da "Say Laura")

There They Were (da "Say Laura")

Wild Moon (da "Slowly Paradise")

An Abandoned Rose" (da "Slowly Paradise")

E questa la stampa itallana sul suo precedentne (capo)lavoro
Qui  Blow Up (un bell'8)
Un bell'8,5 sul Mucchio
E solo un 7 su Rumore :-)