Cecile Schott grew up like most of us, in a sleepy suburb where teenage doldrums are fended off in garage bands and carefully arranged mix tapes populated by the Pixies, Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine. It doesn't matter so much that her hometown was 100 kilometers south of Paris, because as the familiar story unfolds, the bands split up, life goes on and an investment is made in one of Tape Op's favorite modern marvels: the 4-track.
Although the music Cecile makes today under the name Colleen is constructed on her home computer, there's no mistaking that her years experimenting with 4-track recording have made an impact. In fact, Colleen's sound is practically a celebration of the sonic shortcomings and imperfections of budget analog recordings. Samples of background hiss sway and shuffle like a breeze through a palm tree. The grit of an old acetate record serves as a prickling rhythm under a sample of a detuned jazz guitar. Her debut album Everyone Alive Wants Answers is a 13-song dreamscape that crackles with the sounds of old forgotten records that have been looped, pitched and otherwise transformed into the kind of delicate headphone cinema that commands your attention through its subtlety and creativity.
Intrigued? Here's the kicker: It turns out the only thing Cecile needed to create her album was an old PC and a public library card. It's the kind of story that makes my cold computer geek heart all warm and fuzzy.
How did you first get involved with recording your own music?
I started out in a band in high school, let's say in a noisy pop style, and of course like every band in the history of music we tried to record ourselves for demos. I suppose that's when I first found out that things weren't so easy and that capturing sound was a difficult process often involving the loss of some of the sound's better qualities. After that, my first solo experience of trying to record myself was through a 4-track tape recorder I got when I was 19. Very quickly and without any knowledge of other people's work using these kinds of techniques, I worked with the pitch and also reversed things quite a lot. Of course these two techniques are the most commonly used so there's nothing extraordinary about me using them, but I really tried to make strange music with very few tools: my guitar, an old Bontempi organ, a microphone, headphones which I would use as tweeting birds by putting them close to the mic, plastic bags for a bit of rhythm, glass pots, my toilet's flush. In my album I used a recording of Bontempi organ from that time, and that's the only instrument that is actually played by me on the album. I also recorded works for organ by Bach and other sad classical type music with a microphone in front of the speakers and then slowed down the whole thing drastically by playing the tape directly onto my hi-fi system, and in a way that was my first attempt at using other people's music to create my own. I think I was vaguely aware that sampling existed, but I didn't even know how to switch on a computer, had no money anyway to buy either a computer or a sampler, so that settled the matter.
But you did use a computer to create the songs on your album Everyone Alive Wants Answers?
Yes, an old PC that I originally bought to write my Master's paper, and tons of CDs borrowed from the media libraries in Paris. Of course the advantage of sampling already existing material is that the music is already produced, so even though some people think that the overall album feel is lo-fi, especially because there's so much hiss on many tracks, it's actually not lo-fi at all, because the sound is very deep and warm.
Coming from your experiences playing guitar in bands and composing on your 4-track, how did you hit upon your unique way of sampling and reworking old recordings?
Perhaps the one thing that made a difference is that I discovered music from all styles and periods at the same time. I spent roughly two years borrowing between five and ten CDs every week. So as I was discovering classic electronica stuff I was also discovering lots of acoustic music, and gradually I realized two things. First of all that just as I had never been gifted for rhythm when I played acoustic music, I wasn't gifted for it either when it came to making music on a computer. This feeling was made even stronger by the fact that I loved Autechre and so couldn't see the point of trying to make rhythms when these people were already doing it in a masterful way. So the fact that I ruled out rhythm changed my way of working, since my first year of working on the computer with samples did involve beats. Secondly I realized that at the bottom of my heart I didn't really like modern electronic sounds, found them too cold, with some exceptions. That set my second criterion for sampling stuff: It had to be acoustic.
I'm really fascinated by how you got the majority of your sample material and your music education through trips made to your local library. It made me think about how technology has given this generation such access to the best of both contemporary and historic music and yet most of us take it for granted. In what ways do you think listening to all that historic, neglected music affected your songwriting?
First of all I have to say that I feel incredibly lucky to live in a country where many cultural things can be accessed freely. I think it's really great and I don't see why only rich people should have access to CDs. It's all very well to talk about how mp3 and CD burning kill the music industry and the smaller labels — and of course I'm not denying that there is a problem — but the truth is that CDs are still incredibly expensive for people earning average wages, and even if you make a decent living like I do you might want to spend your money on something else. As far as I'm concerned I'm into instruments, and I can't afford to buy both instruments and many CDs. It's a choice I've had to make and yet I don't see why I shouldn't have access to all the music which I'd like to discover. I'm always pleased to see that my album is very easy to download. It's better for lots of people to have access to it than not to have access to it. Maybe they'll come to a live show, maybe they'll buy the next album, or they'll do neither, but as far as I'm concerned I'd like my music to reach as many people as possible, because I don't think my music is elitist, so I try to see the positive side of it, and also I don't want to be double-faced: I discover a lot of music that way too. To go back to your question, I think it has affected me first in my listening habits: the more you know about music from different periods and places, the more aware you are of what other records really brought to the world of music, or didn't bring. By this I mean that for instance it's good to know old electronic music from the '50s and '60s because then you realize that sometimes what passes for incredibly daring today is actually not that daring at all. Of course listening to music shouldn't be an exercise in musical criticism, that's not what I'm suggesting and I'm certainly still far too ignorant about the history of music worldwide to claim that I could do it myself. But what I mean is that sometimes I've been amazed at how current bands sound like much older bands, and of course this is not a crime in itself, and can very well be unconscious, but still it's good to know that many things have existed before us. It also makes you much more modest. When I see what people from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop were doing with the means they had, I feel ashamed of myself and of the way I sometimes feel limited, whereas the tools I have at my disposal are many times more powerful than theirs, but then again imagination is the most powerful tool of them all. I also feel really humbled when I listen to music from non-Western traditions, because they often sound a lot like the music I dream of making, and again this music is made completely acoustically.
Tell me more about why you deliberately keep synthetic sounds out of your music in favor of purely acoustic sounds.
It's hard for me to analyze it in an intellectual way and of course it's completely personal, it's just than to me there is more emotion in acoustic sounds that in artificial sounds, although of course it doesn't make much sense to separate sound and notes, since music is a combination of both. Actually the electronic music I really love and which I find really warm is either the old electronic stuff by people like Raymond Scott, who seems to have had a very playful approach to music, or music based on tape loops, like the music of Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which actually is acoustic music since they used real-life sounds.
I know you've spent a good deal of time studying the history of acoustic musical instruments and their connection to the technology and culture of the time. Do you consider the sampler as a kind of instrument, or maybe even a kind of meta- instrument?
Well it would be extremely pretentious of me to say that I've "studied" this area. Let's say I have an interest in the subject but unfortunately I'm far too busy at the moment with my full-time job as a teacher and making music and playing live to be able to investigate the subject as much as I would want to. To me sampling stuff is a way of making possible stuff which is physically impossible, things that couldn't be played live no matter the number of musicians or how gifted they were, sounds that couldn't have the same timbre if they were played live. A bit like having something as unlikely as a band playing underwater. But now I'm getting more and more interested in actually producing the sounds myself and then sampling them. But at the moment I'm starting to feel a bit uneasy about sampling other people's stuff, especially as I'm discovering people whose music is mind-blowing and is actually played, for instance Lou Harrison.
Your songs seem to unfold very naturally, often without the benefit of percussion or rhythm to guide the song along. It's as though the samples all got together and found a very organic way to arrange themselves. What are you doing to keep your loop-based compositions from sounding rigid?
I have no idea really, it's just a matter of playing stuff over and over again till it feels exactly right, not too short not too long, the right pitch, the right sounds, the right fade in fade out.
In your songs you can hear lots of background noise, tape hiss, record crackles and dust — artifacts of sampling that many artists would take pains to remove. What made you decide to not only include them, but actually flaunt them in your songs?
I've always hated overproduced stuff, even when I was just listening to pop, and I also have quite a few nice memories of listening to 7-inches from the '60s belonging to my mum when I was a kid, and so of course there's a memory of crackles going with that. I like the physicality of those surface noises, reminding you that the music you hear is recorded and is not coming from some physical void from which sounds would emerge. More prosaically, I just happened to sample beginnings and ends of songs, or quiet passages, in which the sound was lower, and so as I had to turn the volume up or add effects to add warmth to the sound it just enhanced those sounds, and I realized that not only would it be very hard for me to get rid of them, but I actually loved them, for themselves and for the fact that thanks to them my music didn't sound cold and technological.
When I think about how much emotion and mood you're able to evoke in compositions that are very stripped down and minimal in their arrangement, I think of cooking and how sometimes the best dishes are the ones that are prepared using just a few great ingredients with little intervention. It's like, if you really believe in the ingredients, preparing them in a complex dish would only dilute their potency. Does that make any sense or does my analogy need work?
I think that's a wonderful comparison, especially as I'm really fond of food and I like cooking. And guess what? I cook the way you describe it: not too many ingredients because I don't want their flavor to be lost. Some people are very gifted for complex dishes or music — I'm not.
