Words by David C. Obenour
Under the name of Colleen, French artist Cécile Schott has explored the nuances of performance and production for more than two decades. Each album is a new insight into an evolving understanding of existence through new methods and instrumentation – taking listeners on an immersive journey rooted in sound but dense enough to bleed into other perceived senses.
For her most recent, Le jour et la nuit du réel (“The day of the night of reality”) a gifted Moog Grandmother served as inspiration for an instrumental double album dividing day and night. Working within chords and motifs, the songs evolve within keeping to a theme. Reality remains, though how we perceive it changes. Each song. Every listen. A new insight for those willing to hear it.
Off Shelf: Each one of your albums tends to be a new exploration in sound, could set the stage for what you set out to explore with Le jour et la nuit du réel in your own words?
Cécile Schott: I knew something special had happened for me musically when I first used the Moog Grandmother, which Moog sent me as a gift in 2018: when I heard my newly acquired Yamaha Reface-YC organ through the Grandmother’s filter and modulation sections, it was nothing short of a revelation. Because of poor health that affected my work and life conditions from 2018 to 2020, my progress on getting to know the synth was extremely slow, but in May 2020, when I finally started work on my 7th album The Tunnel and the Clearing, I did start exploring it more systematically and used it for 2 songs, “Revelation” and “Hidden in the current”, which proved to be turning points for me from a technical and expressive point of view. By this, I mean that it is the technical properties and possibilities of the Grandmother that give it its expressive power, and the logical conclusion of this is: the more thoroughly you explore those properties, the more expressive power is at your disposal. So I basically fell madly in love with synthesis, to the point where I would say that I feel it is perhaps the musical revelation I waited for all my life, an unlimited tool generating a totally open-ended work process that comprises all the sounds of the universe, able to express all human emotions.
OS: The album didn’t start as a collection of instrumental songs, could you talk about how you came to the realization you wanted to change your approach?
CC: Prior to making The Tunnel and the Clearing, I had wanted to make an album that would be very rhythmical, joyful and focused on the Elka Drummer One, an incredible – and incredibly hard to find – Italian drum machine from 1969, which I had bought in 2018. For many reasons, I ended up making a very different album, The Tunnel. Part of me thought that the next album, then, would perhaps be that joyful, rhythmical album. So when I started work on Le jour, in August 2021, a mere few months after the release of The Tunnel, at first the new music I made was a stylistic continuation of that album, with the same instrumentation and singing, but in a more upbeat mood, though still very much in “reflection” mode as far as lyrics were concerned.
But little by little, learning synthesis took all of my time, because every single time I tried something, I got satisfying results very quickly, so my enthusiasm and the effort-to-reward ratio kept me anchored there. It got to a point where I looked at the massive list of “song embryos” I had, encompassing both the previous multi-instrumental singing approach and the pure synthesis approach, and I realized there was no way this was going to fit into one album.
So a year after I started work on Le jour, I made a drastic decision to just keep the Grandmother and my two beloved delays, the Moogerfooger MF104-M and the Roland RE-201 Space Echo, and that’s when the album truly took shape, even though the tracklisting was massive and a challenge to organize – one hour of music with 21 “movements” spread across 7 suites.
OS: How were those original songs different from what we hear on the final album? What do you think you kept from them, and – aside from the obvious – what do you think changed?
CC: Some songs were completely discarded – something that’s very usual in my work process, as I tend to develop what I like to call “song embryos”, knowing that not all will make it to fully-fledged songs – others became the basis for deep synthesis explorations, with the huge advantage that these were well-developed compositions, not just “patterns” or short sequences, which is often the case for a lot of electronic music.
OS: There’s lots of talk about understanding reality through this music. Where does this come from? How do you think composing helps you better understand reality?
CC: I have long been obsessed, both in real life and artistically, with the subject of the brain’s workings and how that connects with our emotional life and the consequences this in turn has on our actual lives. This is largely due, I think, to my family history, in which my only brother, who was 2 years older than me, committed suicide at the age of 21. I think it’s only recently – his suicide was almost 30 years ago – that I’ve truly realized how deeply I’ve been impacted by the experience of growing up with him and then witnessing the ripple effects of his death on our family.
This interest has deepened with the passing of time, because life constantly puts us in situations where we have to reevaluate what we thought was “true” or “real”, not just in others, but also ourselves. “Reality” is not a palpable object that we can grab in our fist and observe and study, and the increased digitalization of our lives has added an extra layer of complexity to this already slippery grasp.
Finally, my dad has been suffering from Alzheimer’s for some years, and while I was making the album, the disease worsened and I often reflected on how he was slipping into a parallel reality of his own, which nevertheless is for him the only reality there is.
So once I made the decision to not sing and just focus on synthesis, I realized that I had a tool that was both more powerful and more subtle – two things that don’t often go hand in hand – to explore these notions: literally, you can feed the exact same sequence of notes into a synth and come back with 10 different results, some of them so drastically different sonically you’d be hard pressed to know it’s the exact same series of notes underneath the sounds, and sometimes even I have trouble remembering what the original, “unsynthesized” sequence sounded like.
For me, this potentially never-ending transformation of notes into sounds, as well as melodic motifs and harmony reoccurring and being altered across movements within a suite, works as a perfect musical translation of the ungraspable nature of “reality”.
OS: In the album notes you thank Jason Daniello for the donation of the Grandmother, how did that come to pass and what was it about the instrument that so resonated with you? Was it a slow or immediate revelation?
CC: I am so fortunate to have been able to forge an informal work relationship with Moog: they have been beyond generous and supportive of my work, and I still cannot believe that I went from being a musician who had never received any gear to being the recipient of 2 synths and 3 Moogerfoogers from one of the leading synth companies in the world, and such a historically important one too.
This relationship happened really organically, when I first reached out to them before the release of my 6th album, A flame my love, a frequency, in which I had used two Moogerfoogers. It turned out they really liked my work already, so they invited me to record a session at the Moog Sound Lab studio, to mark the end of production of the Moogerfooger line of pedals.
In retrospect, I find it incredible that we connected at the exact moment they were making the first batch of Grandmothers. I remember them telling me on our first Skype meeting “We’re going to release a synth with a spring reverb and we think you may like it.”
Jason Daniello was head of Artist Relations throughout that time, and to this day, doing that session and visiting the factory remains a highlight of my professional life, and for sure my discovery of synthesis will forever be linked to their gift of the Grandmother.
I have also received a Matriarch as compensation for betatesting their incredible Moogerfooger plugins, and I already know my next album will be an exploration of that incredible synth.
OS: You worked with a limited amount of instrumentation on Le jour et la nuit du réel, what was the desire behind that? How did you feel guided or strained while working within those confines?
CC: Since Captain of None in 2015 I’ve really thrived on working with a very limited set of instruments and gear. On The Tunnel, I also stopped using plugins altogether, and Le jour is my first 100% analogue album, with digital only coming into play as far as recording the audio into a DAW and MIDI sequences are concerned.
This is not out of purism, but out of a logical artistic process in which I realized that the better your tools are and the better you know them, the less you need to add. This is the longest I’ve ever worked on an album – 14 months non-stop – as I’d never had that creative stamina before, and hopefully the amount of intention and attention that went into this record can be heard.
The Grandmother’s limitations could be that it is monophonic and has a small keyboard, but I had a blast working around that, making sure I paid extra effort to exploring melody, harmony, chord inversions, etc, and varying the way I play the synth: beyond the synthesis settings, there is a massive difference between playing a synth by hand, using the arpeggiator, a quantized sequence, or an unquantized sequence, and I used all 4 techniques.
So really, even though my tools might seem limited, I actually had 3 main, very rich axes of work: melody/harmony/song construction, synthesis setting/patching, and chosen mode of interpretation.
OS: Do you have any particular sounds or segments from the album that particularly stand out to you in how you were able to capture them?
CC: It is hard to choose, especially because so many of these songs sound different to what I’ve done in the past, and perhaps that’s what makes me happiest: I have released albums for 20 years now and this is my 8th album, renewing oneself is always a challenge, so for me, the mere fact that new songs sound different to what I’ve done in the past and don’t sound like much else that’s out there is enough for me to “make them stand out”.
I would just really encourage the listeners to set aside some quiet time to just listen to the album and experience it as a sonic, mental and emotional journey, possibly in two halves if the full hour feels like a stretch, and in that case I would also recommend people to play the game of listening to the Le jour half during the day and La nuit half at night.
OS: The entire album just feels so palpably vivid, I was wondering – do you envision anything while playing or listening to your music? Is there an unseen visual that accompanies the music?
CC: Thank you for the compliment, and no. I think it’s no coincidence that I’ve never wanted any visuals to accompany my music live, whereas it’s become so predominant over the years. It is enough for me to be carried by music itself, and the emotions from which it is born or which it generates.
OS: With the rise of Youtube collections of “chill beats,” how do you feel about music as background ambiance? Do you feel it at all trivialize the art or are you not as concerned with how the engagement happens?
CC: I personally never put on music at my home if I have guests coming over, I have never liked talking over music, as it just doesn’t make sense to me: if I like something, I want to actively listen to it – in the same way that it wouldn’t occur to me to talk while reading a book or watching a film.
I am also a huge fan of silence or – since true silence is very rare – pleasant non-musical sounds occurring wherever I happen to be. Truth be told, these past few years, I haven’t listened to much music, because I’ve dedicated so much time to making music that once I’m outside the studio, I don’t have that much “bandwidth” left for more music.
As far as other people are concerned, I don’t think it’s for me to have an opinion on how they “receive” music, especially because I’m lucky to have a faithful core audience which – from what they are telling me – do enjoy getting profoundly lost in my music, or having it as an accompaniment for something that holds meaning to them, from their own professional creative pursuits to putting their kids or pets to sleep. Over the years I have also received many moving messages of people telling me my music has helped them get through very challenging moments. This is priceless, and this is what I like to focus on.
OS: Do you have any thoughts on your next inspiration? Any threads from Le jour et la nuit du réel you’d like to follow further?
CC: Yes, if all goes to plan, the next album will focus entirely on the Moog Matriarch, the paraphonic synth Moog released after the Grandmother. It has its own integrated delay, so I may even push the limitation challenge to making the album just with the Matriarch and nothing else.
I’m already super excited at the thought of learning more synthesis, but for this one I also want to take my time, since I’ve been working almost non stop since spring 2020, and now I have many live dates coming up, involving a lot of travelling, so I know that for this to remain enjoyable and in order to not compromise my health, I’ll need to rest and relax in between shows. But in general I feel incredibly optimistic about my musical future and I can’t wait to keep learning more about synthesis to keep expanding musically!