COLONY - MUSIC FOR EMPTY ROOMS

 MUSIC FOR EMPTY ROOMS

IIIHIII 04/2013

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Licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.
You can find more informations about this license here.

Unlike in the past, this time I will provide a little information. I started working on MUSIC FOR EMPTY ROOMS, the fourth album of COLONY, more or less in 2007. The first five tracks were promptly thrown in the refrigerator and left there for almost three years. For good. At that time I was starting to deal with the ALS syndrome that struck my father: accepting the thought of an incurable lifelong degenerating illness that would have trasformed the body into a dumb rubber puppet while the mind would have been awake during the whole process was frightening and unbearable. And I felt ashamed of my feelings because that illness wasn't even happening to me. Since I absolutely could not imagine what it was really like, this inner distance only boosted my sense of guilt.

I used to watch the little bedroom in which the increasingly detached body of my father was living 24 hours a day, thinking about the moment in which that room would have been empty, meaning that the suffering would finally be over.

My father is still alive and the illness is still going.

That was the starting point. First I tried to avoid and escape that hopeless situation and then I tried to confront it. In the meantime, in the silence of the aforementioned refrigerator, MUSIC FOR EMPTY ROOMS had changed, had evolved and was ready to became a thing of its own. In its first version the album should have included only six tracks. Then those tracks became ten, then eighteen and then nothing. Deeply unsure of its future release, I stopped working on it for another year and in the meantime I recorded my half of CITIES APART. And that's why you could notice some sonic correspondences between the two works.

Then suddenly, in no special day or particular situation, MUSIC FROM EMPTY ROOMS came back from the dead and during the following months rushed to its end. That's it. Things have fallen into their places and the scheme has displayed itself in front of me naturally, like a book or a flower. Well, sort of.

Now I'm satisfied with the final result, that is the version you can enjoy and download for free, as usual.

Two more things:

One: Memory is a deep well in which sometimes we end up seeing only the wrong things. Two: I'm not so good at playing piano.

For those of you who might need further explanation about the lenght of each track and therefore might argue if something went wrong during the creative process of the album, I can only say that the total timing of 2 hours and 10 minutes is absolutely purposeful.

Although the album isn't perfect, perfection wasn't the idea. To me making music has NOTHING to do with being perfect, beautiful, cool, acceptable, new or groundbreaking. If any of these things happen, it would be merely incidental. To me making music has EVERYTHING to do with expression, communication, trasfiguration, healing and reconciliation. To me making music is trying to do always my best, no matter the elements involved. No matter what the result will be or if people will like it or not.

My deepest gratitude go to 'John' Mario Vallenari of CABEZON RECORDS for lending me the song "Well Of Memory", to Maria Messina for evoking the ghosts in "You Never Came Back Home" and to Davide Saggioro of Wise mastering Studio for holding all the sound structure together.

Now it's finally time to let MUSIC FOR EMPTY ROOMS to go where it has to and try to move on again. And where do I go from here? That's a good question I'll try to answer with the second part of what could be a trilogy of sorts, that is the new album TIME DESTROYS EVERYTHING, out in 2014.

"...what did Time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like, it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room, or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing" (Ray Bradbury - Night Meeting, 1950).

Thank you for staying up late for this.

Always be elusive. 

S.

Music For Empty Rooms by Colony is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

COLONY / SINNER DC

SINNER DC - WHERE SHE GOES EP

 

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Sometimes I wonder if another part of me managed to pull it through. If it has been able to clean up this mess, get a decent job, love you more than I did, become a better person and finally lead a normal life. Sometimes I wish things had been that way.

And maybe they did, in a future that never happened.

"Where She Goes" (Mental Groove Records) is the new EP from swiss electronic band SINNER DC and contains, among others, a remix by Colony. This beautifully haunting song has been de-constructed and re-constructed by Colony and mastered by Davide Saggioro at Wise Mastering Studio.

"Where She Goes" is taken from SINNER DC's 2012 album called "Future That Never Happened". You can get it here. Many thanks to Olivier, Manuel and Sinner DC.

Always be elusive.

S.

 

COLONY / TOM COLBIE

Stillness is one of the elements of TOM COLBIE imaginary that resonate in me the most. In his panels, everything seems frozen in time and space. Or just moving at a rate so low that a human eye cannot even notice it.

I guess it's because of that space suit.

Wondering who's inside that suit, trapped by unknown - or forgotten - circumstances in a sort of P.K.Dick desolate crossroad between different realities, could be a rather intriguing exercise. While trying to put all the clues together in a meaningful scheme, we should also bear in mind that the old, good "show, don't tell" magic trick still exists to prevent us travellers from going uselessly too far with our investigations, because some mysteries are better left unsolved.

That said, I have a precise idea about who's hiding safely inside that space suit, but I obviously won't tell it to you.

Silence seems another element the worlds of Tom Colbie are drowned in. Silence is the most natural element we can quite naturally add to stillness. And I guess that this closes our Moebius loop. I wonder if in the strange places depicted by mister Colbie there is no sound at all, like in a giant-sized anechoic chamber, or if some distant, tiny noises are vaguely heard coming from somewhere.

Tom Colbie surely knows all that is peculiar in the surrealist practice. Ernst, Dalì and Jodorowsky might be key parts of the game. I will ask for some answers when I'll have the chance to meet him in person. If this will ever happen.

When elusive Tom asked COLONY to contribute a track for his PARADOX videoclip, I began toying with bizarre ideas about pink and white noise, with some odd sounds and loops and then - strangely - I ended messing around with Now We Are One, the 2010 opener from MEET, MERGE, DISSOLVE.

Needless to say, a few hours later the music had independently evolved in a complete different direction and therefore I felt it was right to allow it to go wherever it wanted to.

The video animations are brilliantly provided by Ag0 and his working unit called E-GAIN.

You can find more informations here.

Many years ago André Breton said that "The imaginary is what tends to become real". Ok, I'll buy that. Personally, when there seems to be no plausibility at all, I find out a lot about myself by sleeping.

Dreams, they are who I really am.

Dive in Tom Colbie's worlds here.

"Sir, this place has only three exits: Madness, and Death”
(René Daumal - A Night Of Serious Drinking, 1938).

Always be elusive.

S.











Colony is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

CHARMING SEPULCHER

CHARMING SEPULCHER

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Licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.
You can find more informations about this license here. 

The year of the mayan armageddon has simply been a year of pauses. A lot of work and turmoil that - except a couple of nice things that I will not tell you - ultimately went nowhere. A pause after the other after another.

CHARMING SEPULCHER is a web compilation and also the first release from HAVE FAITH IN SOUND webzine, which is directed by Kevin Carnaille. Kevin has contacted 33 musicians (Saaad, Pleq, Tsone, Huron, Olkin Donder, John 3:16, Listening Mirror, Sàdon, uuuuuu, Akito Misaki among many, many others) and asked each one of them to contribute a track for this project. The compilation is divided in three parts and the music goes from drone to noise and concrète and from ambient to various kinds of experimental electronica.

Colony contributes a track called "Just A Little Blackout". This track will feature - albeit in a different form - in the forthcoming fourth album called MUSIC FOR EMPTY ROOMS, which is taking almost three years in the making but will be hopefully ready in a few months. You can listen to this track here.

Things have slowed down dangerously in the last period, but CHARMING SEPULCHER gave me the chance to break the rules that some contingencies and personal issues were imposing on me, to exit the aforementioned pause state and catch the last train just before everything passed the point of no return, that is the point where every taken decision is always too late and therefore is meaningless, futile and pathetic. For this reason, I have to thank Kevin Carnaille twice, because he asked Colony to contribute a track and also gave me the opportunity to work on the definitive shape of the whole compilation, namely the overall sound engineering and tracklisting. As always, Davide Saggioro crucially helped me in managing sound physics, odd frequencies, huge blasting audio spectrums and so on. You can find more information about him and his studio here.

It was a challenging task. It moved me deeply.
I hope you will like this compilation as much as I liked working on it. 

In CHARMING SEPULCHER part II, there's also a track from an american musician called ELLIE ARROWAY, whose first album is being arranged and produced by Colony and should be fully completed in the next months too. You can listen to this track here.

Here are some additional information in this Q&A with Kevin.

Q: what criteria did you follow in choosing the 33 musicians? 

A: I didn't have followed "special criterias" in choosing all these musicians. I just wanted to share eclectic sounds! The experience of Have Faith In Sound (and Indie Rock Mag too) helped me to find easily who I wanted to see on Charming Sepulcher. I discovered many good musicians that we are not used to see, I hoped it was a good way helping them to be more " visible " and being mixed with other musicians that, maybe, they could never know. But, of course, I've chosen them because I thought they could correspond with the theme "Charming Sepulcher", in a certain way.
 
Q: what Charming Sepulcher should mean in its whole?  

A: My vision of this concept is quite simple. The name had been chosen to symbolise a fascination for dark/sad music. I wanted to propose an ambiguous topic without giving more details, just to see how musicians would translate it. Finally,  we (with you haha) had noticed that 3 visions of the concept emerged. That's why Charming Sepulcher has been cut into 3 parts, to keep some homogeneity into each ones. It was a way to show that the same feeling can be conveyed in many ways. Moreover, you will see that the last part is much less dark than the others. It was an assumed choice, which was to nuance the deep darkness previously developed, as a glimmer of hope.

Q: what plan do you have for the future of Have Faith In Sound? 

A: First of all, I would like to extend the team. Finding some curious people attracted by this kind of universe. I can also say that the tastes of the blog will gradually evolve, because I must admit it's not very open-minded yet, even if I use to listen many different things everyday. And finally, I think it will not be the last compilation I plan to release. For now, that's all I can say!

CHARMING SEPULCHER is free for you to download and share.

"There are two kinds of pauses: the pause which comes before something happens and the pause which comes afterward. There is never a pause which means nothing. When you have a pause, you must always be conscious that something will be done or that something has been done. [...] The pause must always be the result of something, or it should be just before something. Without the feeling of the whole, pause has no significance" (Michael Chekhov, 1936). 

Merci Kevin pour la précieuse opportunité que vous m'avez donnée. 

Always be elusive.

S.





Charming Sepulcher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.