Colleen - Les Ondes Silencieuses

  by Andrew Carver

published: 18 / 6 / 2007




Colleen - Les Ondes Silencieuses


Label: Leaf Label
Format: CD
Evocative third album of baroque minimalism from Colleen, the moniker for Parisian musician Cecile Schott, which finds her experimenting with a viola da gamba



Review

Cecile Schott’s last work, 'Colleen et Les Boites A Musiques', employed the interplay of music boxes – the 19th-century equivalent, if you will, of the music loops she used to construct her first album – to fascinating effect. For ‘Les Ondes Silencieuses’, her third album as just Colleen, she’s turned to the viola da gamba, an instrument not unlike a fretted cello, to create much of the music. Whatever instrument she employs, the result is a baroque minimalism, using the bare set of notes to set the mood; lead off track ‘This Place in Time' sets the pace with a simple, melancholic four-note motif. On ‘Sun Against My Eyes’ she returns to the classical guitar’ of ‘The Golden Morning Breaks’, her second album, augmented with clarinet, while ‘Le Labyrinthe' employs the spindly hammered notes of the spinet. Some multi-tracking is used to fill out the sound, with the sound of the viola being plucked and bowed running into one another, but overall this is a spare, gentle and evocative work, the soundtrack to a contemplative wander in some desolate but pretty spot.



Track Listing:-

1 This Place In Time
2 Le Labyrinthe
3 Sun Against My Eyes
4 Les Ondes Silencieuses
5 Blue Sands
6 Echoes And Corals
7 Sea Of Tranquillity
8 Past The Long Black Land
9 Le Bateau
10 Unfold Out (Live in Japan, Asahi Art Square, Tokyo, 4th November 2006)
11 Serpentine (Live in Japan, Asahi Art Square, Tokyo, 4th November 2006)
12 I’ll Read You A Story (Live in Japan, Asahi Art Square, Tokyo, 4th November 2006)


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