COLLEEN
Issue #32
Les Ondes Silencieuses
By Kelly Shindler
Published: June 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
Colleen is the nom de plume of Paris-based Cécile Schott. Her compositions feel old and wise, like the familiar twinklings of a music box. But she hacks into this box as if it were an 8-bit video game, reconfiguring its sequences to forge an entirely new sound out of old materials. Like her moniker, her music seems deceptive in its simplicity. Still, make no mistake — Colleen’s experimentation is straight out of the 21st century. If you’re into the Austrian ambient guitar antihero, Fennesz, you’ll brim with amour for Colleen.
Free of the looping electronics that marked her earlier work, Les Ondes Silencieuses shows Colleen appropriating centuries-old instruments to contemporary ends. She tinkers with a harpsichord-like spinet, the soulful clarinet, some crystal glasses, and, of course, her trusty classical guitar. The centerpiece is Colleen’s custom-fabricated viola da gamba (viol), an ancestor of the cello. The range of sounds she elicits, whether she’s plucking, bowing, or beating it for percussion’s sake are remarkable. Les Ondes Silencieuses translates to The Silent Waves, but an onde is also a sound wave, and this double meaning is exploited to hypnotic effect. The album’s onomatopoeic rendering of an ocean swelling and retreating, in turmoil and at rest, is vibrantly realistic. It culminates in the closer, “Le Bateau,” and what sounds like the story of a boat heading out to sea, into a storm, then recovering from the aftermath.
Behind the sparse composition, Les Ondes Silencieuses has a heady agenda, so easy listening or background music it’s not. But force your ears to pay attention and listen to Colleen, the one-woman show, as she creates a enchanting theater of sound all her own.
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