Colleen

Cécile Schott, known by the stage name Colleen (1976), is a French musician devoted to a sound that blends folk and electronica with avant-garde techniques.

She began her career as a composer around 2001, when she discovered computer programming through the software Acid Pro. She released her debut album "Everyone Alive Wants Answers" in 2003 on the UK label Leaf. The tracks feature plenty of looped samples, often layered on top of one another. Live, however, Colleen tries to recreate the same sounds using a range of classical instruments such as cello, viola da gamba, spinet, clarinet, classical guitar and harp.

The solid success of her debut album spurred her to write new material. In 2005 she released "The Golden Morning Breaks": ten magnificent compositions in which it's above all the instinctive nature of her inspiration that allows her to move beyond the folktronica experiments of her first record. Colleen proves capable of a compositional approach that can make meticulous textures vibrate with the fervour of spontaneous improvisation, or draw from small inflections a remarkable, oblique view of life.

In 2006 she released a live album, "Mort aux Vaches" on Staalplaat. It consists of seven compositions (each built around the sound of a single instrument, including the Tyrolean zither, ukulele, classical guitar and cello) recorded for the eponymous series at the studios of Dutch radio station VPRO. Once again, it's a work of great depth that, while not reaching the heights of its predecessor, showcases the French musician's mastery in conjuring atmospheres of rare intensity.

In October of the same year came the EP "Colleen et les Boîtes à Musique", featuring tracks composed using music boxes.

In 2007 her third album "Les Ondes silencieuses" came out, in which, having abandoned samples and loops, the French composer carves a deep furrow into what is, to all intents and purposes, neo-classical and minimalist music.

In 2014 comes a new work, titled "The Weighing Of The Heart", where Colleen is still grappling with an intimism made of plucked strings in gentle torpor and a voice that, alone or layered with ghostly textures, reaches toward sublime human-too-human heights.

A year later comes "Captain Of None", in which the French composer once again juggles minimalist textures and melodic glimmers.

In 2021, instead, "The Tunnel And The Clearing" marks a sort of marriage between electronics and acoustics on the French artist's most direct album to date.

The 2023 work, "Le jour et la nuit du réel", released on Thrill Jockey, finds the French artist tackling a "progressive" electronic record centered on the opposition between day and night.

In "Libres Antes Del Final" (2026), Cécile Schott fully embraces the electronic splendor of the Moog Matriarch for "an ode to movement, to the body, to water, to urgency".