Colleen Announces New Album 'The Tunnel and the Clearing'

Colleen, artist and composer Cécile Schott, has announced her new album The Tunnel and the Clearing, out May 21st, 2021. The Tunnel and the Clearing finds the profound composer at her most vulnerable and confident, invoking contemplative and swirling organ processed through analog electronics, steady drum machine syncopations and her distinctive voice to embody breaking through the nexus of compounding transitions. On an album centered on processing the complicated washes of emotion through tribulations and revelations Colleen presents a vision of breathless clarity. First single "Gazing at Taurus - Santa Eulalia" draws inspiration from the city of Barcelona, named after city's patron saint. Schott explains:

"On an exceptionally clear night in my new home, I was able to gaze at the Taurus constellation, observing the spectacular Pleiades for the first time in my life. I tried to repeat the experience a year later, but of course this time felt totally different. Santa Eulalia is a statue that stands atop a cathedral spire nearby. I saw her every day from my window and greeted her on my daily walk, and she ended up becoming my own personal symbol of resilience in this troubled year."

Colleen began work on The Tunnel and the Clearing in 2018 only to be met with extreme fatigue from a previously undiagnosed illness that all but halted her work. The following months and years of treatment and adjustment eventually led to relocating to a new home and studio in Barcelona, which was soon followed by lockdowns and ultimately the dissolution of her longtime partnership.

The impact of deep reflecting on these cumulative experiences found Schott completely reimagining her compositional practices through her enduring gift for reinvention. Schott spent months in near complete silence apart from composing and ruminating on her newfound perspective through her music. Says Schott, "Never before had I felt so profoundly the power that music has, through harmony, melody, rhythm and sound itself, to express the whole range of human emotions." The resulting seven pieces investigate the complex, at times contradictory relationship between excitement and fear, anger and understanding, struggle and triumph, all focused on a reconstruction of the self.

Listen here:

Photo Credit: Luis Torroja

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