COLLEEN - Libres antes del final

Settled into the style of the previous Le jour et la nuit du réel, but pervaded by a brighter vivacity, the new work by Cécile Schott shows us just how much her move to Barcelona has affected her life and artistic path. The urge to experiment is palpable, and the result is an involved, deeply committed record.

Having fully abandoned her ethereal neoclassicism, Colleen has definitively embraced the electronic splendor of the Moog Matriarch, and through the processing and re-amping done at Casa Montjuic she has found the shape of a dense, dreamlike seaside kosmische musik that wraps Klaus Schulze in "an ode to movement, to the body, to water, to urgency."

The courage to plunge into the Iberian waves, having overcome a hydrophobia that had plagued her for years, allowed Schott not only to finally enjoy the Mediterranean on the Catalan coast, but also to find the concept for her new album. The Spanish-language song titles evoke the physical freedom of submersion as a metaphor for sensory liberation; where is my mind? In the unknowable, together with the subtle pleasure of danger that, within terror, heightens wonder.

The album opens with "Mis Armas se habían caído al suelo," the only nostalgic glance back at the minimal ambient of her earlier work (recalling the excellent "A Flame My Love, A Frequency"); it's a fleeting passage before launching into the unexplored. "Puertas de mi Cuerpo" is already elsewhere, where the electronics grow sharper and liquid delayed harmonies stretch sinuously over a tight, insistent beat. Likewise "Antídoto," in brighter, clearer tones, plays between accelerations and slowdowns, melodic rises and falls, recreating that physical sense of surrendering to the current, which in "Aguas abiertas," with its boundless resonances, becomes a longing to drift.

Every new movement springs forth with fresh vitality, submerging the track and reshaping it, turning the sonic body into something alive, elastic, receptive, aware. "Libres antes del final," over a quiet, pulsing underwater rhythm, compresses the electronics into a heavily saturated bubble of feedback and beating tones, building toward a crescendo of exuberance and arpeggios.

Cécile Schott once again proves herself a multifaceted artist, in love with exploration and drawn to the endless possibilities of her instruments; she delivers a solid concept album, but above all a decisive turn toward a stubborn analogue electronics — perhaps less rich than her best work, but certainly vital and driven by a renewed enthusiasm.

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12/04/2026