COLONY - YOU LEFT ME DEALING WITH YOUR GHOSTS

YOU LEFT ME DEALING WITH YOUR GHOSTS

IIIHIII 08/2018

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

I think that you would have appreciated the black humor of the fact that your mortal remains are buried in a graveyard which is only 200 meters away from the trusted recording studio I always book for some crucial sound engineering and for mastering my COLONY albums. I can't help thinking about this weird sh*t every time I have to go there to finalize some new music: at the crossroad I can drive my car to the left and go to the studio, or turn to the right and go straight to the graveyard. It's a situation so absurd it could be easily dumped in a bad Cohen Brothers' movie, where I would be trapped in a lame Steve Buscemish version of myself. Especially if it is winter. Ha. I know you would have laughed at this movie.

This album is dedicated to you, dear MG. Thank you for having listened to my music throughout the years, but above all thank you for all the friendship, the energy and the genuine laughter you always gave me.

By the way, the Cohen Brothers don't usually do bad movies. 

Sometimes rage is unstoppable, unbearable. Like a big, inner implosion triggered by some awkward words or some sudden, uncontrolled memory. A lot of energy bursts out and then goes simply nowhere. And this process leaves you a little more empty and powerless each time. This is one of the main reasons I'm still making music after thirty years. It's part of a self-healing process. It goes like this: you take some of your baddest demons from your private underworld, you smash them between the notes of the pentagram until they stop screaming or simply breaking your balls. Repeat the whole process when needed and that's it. As far as my experience is concerned, I can tell you that most people really don't understand this basic and pretty narcissistic method, but I guess that some of you out there know perfectly what I'm talking about.

Nevertheless, as time goes by, one has to get over it. Or make some room for something else. It's the old but always appropriate "Life goes on etc." story, plain and simple. One day you emerge from this engulfed dream and discover that the rage is gone and that's all. Phew. Or you never wake up and you live all your life with it.

(This is the fourth time I try to write some lines for this album. I won't go back and start again once more. So forgive me if I go full trainwreck-style).

I gave all that I can give in the making of YOU LEFT ME DEALING WITH YOUR GHOSTS. I cannot say if it was enough to pull off a good work, but I worked my *ss off as if there were no tomorrow - just like I used to for the other albums, actually - but this time was a bit different. It was really difficult to put all the things together, if you know what I mean. Something like trying to land with a parachute on a raft that is continuously moving on stormy waters. Something like "Sorry my chap, but the alarm did not function this morning and you will be late for work". Something like knowing precisely that you're not a bad person - yeah, anyone can friendly reassure you about this - but you are guilty anyway. But I really like the result. I am somewhat satisfied. I know that this strange, positive feeling will last for a pair of months only, but I hope that you - my beloved listeners and followers around this blue spot we call Earth - will like this album even if it's more beat-driven than usual and that it will stay for much longer in your headphones, leaving you wanting for more.

Friendship is a little, stubborn thing that refuse to surrender.
Even more so now that you are no longer here.

"A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence" (Milan Kundera -  The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984).

Always be elusive.

S.

You Left Me Dealing With Your Ghosts by Colony is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

WE ARE INVISIBLE NOW, VOLUME 3

WE ARE INVISIBLE NOW - VOLUME 3

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

WE ARE INVISIBLE NOW - VOLUME 3 is the new addition in my ongoing series of web compilation that ponders over the meaning (and the consequences, maybe) of being invisible, featuring stellar, inspiring music from ANDREW HEATH, RIM, OVERTONE, SCOTT SNEE, TALKINGMAKESNOSENSE, MURKOK, VALANCE DRAKES, GALLERY SIX, JACK HERTZ, BEN RATH, JOHN GILMORE and Maestro FRANCISCO LOPEZ. My deepest and most sincere thanks goes to all of them for accepting to participate.

Since WE ARE INVISIBLE NOW is a no-profit sound project, also VOLUME 3 is free for you to download and share. You can listen and grab the whole album (and the previous two) also on Archive.

Please follow and support all the wonderful musicians that have made this project possible. Enjoy the album and spread the word. Thank you.

WE ARE INVISIBLE NOW - VOLUME 4 will be released sometime in the near future, but I'm sorry to say that there is no date set yet: unfortunately things have the strange peculiarity of not going the way one would like, both in the short and in the long term. I guess I'm not telling you anything new. Anyway, you can keep in touch with this project and the musicians involved so far by following its page on this famous social network.

"They say that none of us exists, except in the imagination of his fellows, other than as an intangible, invisible mentality” (Edgar Rice Burroughs).

Always be elusive. 

S.

We Are Invisible Now is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

COLONY - NODES

NODES

IIIHIII 07/2016

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

The recording sessions for what has gradually become in the last five years my "Trilogy of Absence" (MUSIC FOR EMPTY ROOMS, TIME DESTROYS EVERYTHING, MILES AND MILES OF NOTHING) spawned several tracks that didn't make the final cut of each one of the aforementioned albums, mainly for a question of overall length. To put simply, there was already a lot of things to listen to that I worried that adding another track would have definitely spoiled the broth. So I did my choices.

Obviously - according to the famous, unwritten universal law that we all know - things often tend to start in a way and end in another and what should have been a simple compilation of out-takes became with the passing of months a completely different object: during the remixing phase new ideas started to merge into old ones (and viceversa), new sounds leading to new tracks slowly emerged from somewhere in the back of my mind, new connections were established, new meanings appeared and NODES, the seventh album of COLONY, became a thing of its own, with its underlying theme and its precise direction. At least, the direction was - and still is - precise for me.

NODES is the end of a cycle started in 2010. A lot of things has happened since then. Some of them were bad and unfortunately they had a lasting influence, but that's how life goes.

On a more optimistic note, the new album of COLONY - which is already in the works - will be called YOU LEFT ME DEALING WITH YOUR GHOSTS and will head in a slightly different direction, bringing back sclerotic beats, brooding urban soundscapes, rumbling basslines and some soaring vocals too. Sounds promising, doesn't it?

If I should write myself down, I would be one of those murky characters obsessed by the faults they've done in the past and paralyzed by the fact that they cannot do nothing for redeeming themselves now. "Too little, too late", they said in certain kind of movies. Or in smart books. And indeed it is. Nevertheless, I got to find a way out. As a consequence of this ceaseless head-scratching process, more music will be produced. Stay tuned.

"It feels like a moment I've lived a thousand times before, as if everything is familiar, right up to the moment of my death, that it will happen again an infinite number of times, that we will meet, marry, have our children, succeed in the ways we have, fail in the ways we have, all exactly the same, always unable to change a thing. I am again at the bottom of an unstoppable wheel, and when I feel my eyes close for death, as they have and will a thousand times, I awake" (Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything Is Illuminated, 2002).

Always be elusive.

S.

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

WE ARE INVISIBLE NOW, VOLUME 2

WE ARE INVISIBLE NOW - VOLUME 2

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

WE ARE INVISIBLE NOW - VOLUME 2 picks up where VOLUME 1 left off, bringing you again high quality dynamics, subtle electronics, hazy and vast soundscapes, some bright light and some deep darkness too. In two words: beautiful music.

WE ARE INVISIBLE NOW - VOLUME 2 is free for you to download and share and features MIND OVER MIDI, LUGSHAR, SIJ, JACOB NEWMAN, OFF LAND, ANDREW JAMES ANDERSON, DANIEL J. DAVIS, SENTEM, EISENLAGER, GRETEL, ØYSTEIN JØRGENSEN, HER BLUE LIES, ENDLESS MELANCHOLY and UJJAYA. You can listen and download the whole album also on Archive.

Dear Listeners,

I can't say more words to express how thankful I am for your appreciation.

WE ARE INVISIBLE NOW - VOLUME 3 will be hopefully released towards the middle of 2016. Keep in touch with this project and the wonderful musicians involved so far by following its page on this famous social network.

"I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable" (David Foster Wallace, 1993).

Always be elusive. 

S.

We Are Invisible Now is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

COLONY - MILES AND MILES OF NOTHING

 

MILES AND MILES OF NOTHING

IIIHIII 06/2015 - SE062

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

MILES AND MILES OF NOTHING - the new album of COLONY - is the last chapter of a trilogy about absence and memory, the first two chapters being the previous MUSIC FOR EMPTY ROOMS in 2013 and TIME DESTROYS EVERYTHING at the beginning of this year. I know that I'm callously ruminating on boring themes that were already old some hundred years ago and that I can't add something really new or particularly important to this famous and painful topic, but I don't care. For those of you still willing to follow the sonic meditations of Colony - and you have my endless gratitude and appreciation for this - here's a sixtyfour-minute soundtrack for an imaginary road movie.

I like movies very much. I like roads too. The less travelled they are, the better.

Sure, these roads are sometimes hard to find on the map - if there is one - and they may also hide long shadows and serious perils. You may lose yourself and come back home late at night. Or never come back at all. But there's also the chance to find an entirely, unexpected new direction. And a new landscape too. Or maybe a door that opens on the same old house from where you left the day before. You think you're home and safe again and then you discover that someone else is now living in your place. Wearing your dresses. Eating your dinner. Sleeping in your bed. And that person is you. Pretty frightening.

Another scene.
Imagine the postman delivers you a letter.
The envelope is closed and there's a writing on it. It says:
"Do not open until the last day".

It all could also be an allegory for the old "forgive and forget" story, but since I don't want to give away too many hints about MILES AND MILES OF NOTHING, let's say that it's a comfort to think there is always the possibility to find a way out.
Because there is always a possibility, isn't there?

As you will notice, the album contains some ambient tracks taken from the 2007 debut THIS MACHINE NEVER SLEEPS and the following MEET, MERGE, DISSOLVE. I know someone might say that this is a rather strange choice and suggest that perhaps ideas are running out in the lab, but I assure you that this is not the case: these tracks from the past of COLONY are here again for a precise reason and they are purposefully mixed together with the other present-day, all-new compositions created bearing in mind the aforementioned soundtrack.

Maybe there's something small and precious at the end of the road and then it will be really worth it to have traveled so long. Who knows.
But I think it's time to go. To move on.

The next step will be the already announced collection called NODES, which has been postponed when this new album suddenly came out from nowhere and immediately claimed to be finished as soon as possible. 

MILES AND MILES OF NOTHING has been released on the renowned italian electronic netlabel STATO ELETTRICO. You can download the album in MP3 format directly from the label's large catalogue here. Many, many thanks to everyone involved.

Some things never change. They have only ceased to exist as objects and since then they lived solely as non-datable circumstances, well far out from that sequence of elements we call time. 

"When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again, then you will have given up" (Cormac McCarthy - The Road, 2006).

Always be elusive.

S.

Miles And Miles Of Nothing by Colony is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

WE ARE INVISIBLE NOW, VOLUME 1

WE ARE INVISIBLE NOW - VOLUME 1

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

WE ARE INVISIBLE NOW is a project I wanted to bring to life for quite some time.

This compilation features the works of several composers and sound-artists that I deeply admire and it is sonically focused on ambient, electronic, experimental and drone music. Most of these instrumental soundscapes have been created especially for this album, while a few others have been carefully chosen on purpose by their creators, so as to adhere to the general mood. I'm very pleased with the overall result and with the sonic flow that naturally surrounds the listener, leading the experience from one track to another until the very end.

The title of the album is pretty self-explanatory and I think it doesn't need to be further examined. Suffice to say that it could be easily everything the mind suggest in relation to the sound itself or simply just an invitation: a "let's meet in this twilight place" letter, sent to everyone who will choose to listen and dive into these two hours of beautiful, haunting music.

WE ARE INVISIBLE NOW - VOLUME 1 is released today, is free for you to download and share and features CARL SAGAN'S GHOST, KASHYA, PHILLIP WILKERSON, AKITO MISAKI, LATTICE, POSTDROME, EUS, MISLEADING STRUCTURES, A DEATH CINEMATIC, EIGENGRAU, SLEEP ORCHESTRA, HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY, WARM SPEAKERS, ON MOUNTAINS and I AM ESPER.

You can listen and download the whole album also on Archive.

Please follow and support all the wonderful musicians that have made this project possible. Enjoy the album and spread the word. Thank you.

There's also a new COLONY track in it, called "My Last Cup Of Cofee On The Way To Basel". I've never been to Basel. But I think I'll definitely go, should this be necessary sometime in the future. Only cats have many lives, while we have only one. And I agree that "the end is important in all things".

WE ARE INVISIBLE NOW - VOLUME 2 will be hopefully released this November. Keep in touch with the project and the musicians involved by following its page on this famous social network.

"Mystery has its own mysteries and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what’s known as infinity" (Jean Cocteau - The Infernal Machine, 1932).

Always be elusive. 

S.

We Are Invisible Now is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

COLONY - TIME DESTROYS EVERYTHING

TIME DESTROYS EVERYTHING

IIIHIII 05/2015

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

After a ten-year long degenerative illness, my father passed away the same morning I went to the studio to begin mastering these tracks. I cannot help but see some beauty in such punctuality. TIME DESTROYS EVERYTHING is the fifth album of COLONY and is dedicated to him.

Some textures and soundscapes were created during the previous sessions of MUSIC FOR EMPTY ROOMS, but I decided not to include them in that album for fear of its playlist becoming really too long. So they ended up here pretty naturally, some of them with only little postproduction added and some drastically mixed with a lot of live improvisation, tape manipulation and other things. As a consequence of this free process - and as a precise choice too, obviously - in TIME DESTROYS EVERYTHING there are no riffs, no hooks, no beats or other discernible rhythmic structures. Well, almost.

Tracks 1, 12 and 13 were recorded in the controlled environment of my lab and represent the link between this last album and MUSIC FOR EMPTY ROOMS. As I wrote a year ago, they are indeed the first two chapters of a planned trilogy about absence and memory.

Many thank-you's go to my trustworthy sound engineer and long time friend Davide Saggioro of Wise Mastering Studio, who skillfully brought these tracks to life and to artist Michele Morando for allowing me to use his painting called "Chambre Sur La Mer": I believe it is the perfect representation of the sound of TIME DESTROYS EVERYTHING. You can find more information about him and his atelier here.

And finally my deepest gratitude goes to all of YOU, dear listeners and followers in my country and around the world. I'm happy and proud to say that you are many.

I don't know if time can really destroy everything, but a part of me doesn't hope so for sure. The other part simply just doesn't care.

However, in a constant struggle with entropy, it's already time to step ahead and move on. The next album is called NODES and it is a collection of ambient tracks which - over the last eight years - I dropped out at the last minute essentially for a matter of sonic homogeneity with the albums in which they should have been included. And then again - hopefully in 2016 - I'll be back to my roots with some serious kick drums, bass lines and more strictly-electronic stuff like that. Since things tend to be more short-term than we might think, it is important to have a lot of things to do in life.

"Got into something dangerous and strange. I was into nothing and that's the way I behaved. And I like those deep dark thoughts that leave you stranded way in mid-air. And I'd like to do something that makes somebody somewhere care. Playing with fire, why should I mind? I'm going beyond now and what will I find? Corridors filled with smoke and all the trees uprooted and dead. I was torn apart by my love for a different land" (Lawrence - Hours Of Darkness Have Changed My Mind, 1986).

Always be elusive. 

S.

Time Destroys Everything by Colony is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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.

COLONY / AKITO MISAKI - CITIES APART

CITIES APART

IIIHIII 03/2012

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

Strange is the way things go sometimes. I'm not telling you anything new. Akito Misaki and I never met. Maybe we will, one day. Who knows. We just had brief conversations on a social network about music, idioms, movies, earthquakes, loss and things like these. I've never even seen his face.

The idea of making a three tracks collaborative EP lasted a month or so and then quickly snowballed into a nine tracks full-fledged album, now available for you to download and listen to. Once again, mighty Davide Saggioro is in the control room, keeping all the things together: you can find more information about him and his studio here.

CITIES APART has been conceived and composed totally via web. Akito and I have been sending each other ideas and sounds using email. A very challenging thing to do, but we are really satisfied with the result. Maybe we have been too careful of each other's privacy to use other protocols to comunicate. Who knows. I think this elusive attitude has filtered somehow into the music we have made. Well, maybe. Maybe not.

Too many clues. Too many questions. The answers seem all wrong because some questions are better left unsolved. Also, I've never been a good detective and I guess I never will. Even though I own a cool raincoat.

As usual, I'm not going to tell you what this music is really about.
Go and check for yourself.
We all have different answers. Maybe yours is better than mine.
Maybe it is the right one. Maybe not.

We all have some time to spend, before the world spins out of control.

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away"

(Philip K. Dick, 1978).

Always be elusive.

S.

Cities Apart by Colony / Akito Misaki is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

COLONY - THIS MACHINE NEVER SLEEPS

THIS MACHINE NEVER SLEEPS

IIIHIII 01/2007

LISTEN / DOWNLOAD

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

The new Colony album was a lost album. Until now.

THIS MACHINE NEVER SLEEPS is dated back to 2007 and it represent my first conscious move toward electronic music. I still like the way the tracks sound together as a whole and I'm still proud of all of them, therefore I thought there was no reason for this record to remain unpublished.

I'm sure the most careful of you will notice some of the aspects THIS MACHINE NEVER SLEEPS and MEET, MERGE, DISSOLVE have in common here and there.

Endless thanks to Davide Saggioro for mixing things up, widening the stereo images a lot and mastering all the stuff into something beautifully cohesive and somewhat more enjoyable for all of you. You can find more informations about Davide Saggioro here.

Finalizing THIS MACHINE NEVER SLEEPS was such a hell of a ride, but it's nothing when compared to the towering mole of MUSIC FOR EMPTY ROOMS, which is still in the mixing phase of the production and should be ready sometimes in 2012. Well...hopefully.

But the forthcoming release will be CITIES APART, a split album with a very talented and polyhedric japanese musician called AKITO MISAKI. Check out his first EP here and listen/download other tracks here.

So stay tuned for more music.

My deepest appreciation goes also to MaxFarnea who wrote the track Singularity Ahead with me. MaxFarnea is an electronic musician and a DIY builder: he conceives and plays his music with custom-built instruments he assembles with recycled electric/electronic material. Amazing. Go and check his music here and here.

Back in 2007, THIS MACHINE NEVER SLEEPS was a foundamental experience for me. It changed my life deeply.
It changed the way I relate to music and people in general.

That's all, for now. As usual, thank you for your attention.

Always be elusive.

S.

This Machine Never Sleeps by Colony is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

HELPING HAND

Check out A COMPILATION FOR JAPAN.

"JAPAN STILL NEEDS HELP. Massive earthquakes, a devastating tsunami, and critical nuclear accidents. 15,000 people died, 11,000 are missing, 190,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed. The cost to rebuild Japan will exceed $309 billion.

But it's not too late to help.

We called musicians for help. The result: A COMPILATION FOR JAPAN. 100% of its proceeds will be donated to CIVIC FORCE JAPAN, the country's leading NGO in disaster response & relief, currently working hard to make things better in the country.

This compilation is PAY AS YOU WISH with a 7,99euros minimum for the whole album and 0.99euros per track. You can directly donate on the CIVIC FORCE JAPAN website too. Any kind of help matters!

While Western media isn't covering it as much anymore, the situation in Japan is still critical. People are still without shelters and jobs, business is slow, the agricultural industry is suffering due to rumors of contmination of products, tourists have vanished, many artists are refusing to come perform, and even Japanese people have deserted bars and clubs. It's definitely a bad situation.
But don't forget that YOU CAN STILL HELP!

A big thanx to all the artists who participated by donating songs".

...well, you know what to do.

Many, many thanks to Oliver of MENTAL GROOVE RECORDS for asking Colony to contribute with a new track, called "We Carry The Fire With Us".

You can find the preview here.

Don't be elusive, this time.

S.

COLONY - MEET, MERGE, DISSOLVE

MEET, MERGE, DISSOLVE

IIIHIII 02/2010

LISTEN / DOWNLOAD

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

So, here it is.

If you like this music, please leave a comment.

If you don't like this music, please leave a comment anyway.
Both will be very much appreciated.

Many thanks to Davide Saggioro for his patience behind the mixing desk and for his priceless, wise guidance inside the fascinating labyrinth of sound engineering. You can find more informations about him here.

If you think that this album is about personality disorders, you're almost right. Almost. Nevertheless, anyone can listen to this music and relate to it having in mind whatever else, without necessarily being a schizoid or a psychopath.

The next album will be called MUSIC FOR EMPTY ROOMS.

Endless thanks to you all for your patience, attention, understanding and support.

"Be just and if you can't be just, be arbitrary"
(William S. Burroughs - Naked Lunch, 1959).

Always be elusive.

S.

Meet, Merge, Dissolve by Colony is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

COLONY - WELCOME

Welcome.

COLONY is a sound project based on electronic and experimental music.

I know that this might sounds a bit generic, but I think that picturesque definitions are almost always purely meant to help the listeners label what they are going to put in their portable mp3 reader.

In the case of Colony, they are totally meaningless during the act of conceiving and composition.

The music of Colony will be FREE because it's good to share and comunicate in these desolate times. Also, it's almost unlikely that this pretty sound unit will get a record deal or whatsoever in the near of far future.

Check this page on a regular basis for news, upgrades from the mixing desk and links to other free goodies.

If you'd like to work with - or be remixed by - Colony, feel free to contact.

A technical note: Colony is against the loudness war syndrome.

If you want strong listening emotions, then crank up the volume of your stereo.

Your ears and your brain will do the rest.

Thank you for your attention.

Always be elusive.

S.