About

Colleen (plus support)

"A singular musician; no one else makes music like Colleen’s. Her songs offer a completely unique window on the world" The New Yorker

"Instrumental landscapes that exalt simple abstract wonders" NPR

French artist Cécile Schott aka Colleen is fearless in her willingness to explore new sounds and new ways of creating music as a solo performer.

Over the course of eight critically acclaimed albums (2003–2023), she has consistently reinvented herself, first by taking acoustic instruments out of their usual context and pushing the boundaries of their playability, then through avant-pop electronic explorations, and now dedicates herself to her own unique brand of warm analogue synthesis.

Colleen has played over 250 concerts in prestigious venues across Europe, the US, Japan, Brazil and Singapore and festivals (such as Big Ears, Moogfest, Mutek, Le Guess Who, Transmediale and Rewire).

Colleen’s growing passion for synthesis, bolstered by her collaborations with synth manufacturer Moog, led to her eighth album Le jour et la nuit du réel, released on Thrill Jockey in 2023. Built as a suite of songs, the artist’s first double album is also her first purely instrumental work since 2007, and aims to translate through a myriad of sound transformations the complexity of our relation to reality, and its psychological mutations through the cycles of day and night.

Colleen thrives on reinvention. For over two decades under the name, French artist Cécile Schott has continuously pushed her compositional practice into new directions. Her creative approaches have included complex samples and loops, instrumental processing and even dub production techniques applied to the baroque viola da gamba. Each album immerses the listener in a wholly unique world while remaining unmistakably a work by Colleen. Schott’s compositions glow with carefully considered textures that move in captivating revolutions while subtly evolving. A connective thread of Schott’s work is the exploration of the intricacies of emotion while reveling in the act of contorting pop and classical forms into new shapes.

Colleen’s Le jour et la nuit du réel (released by Thrill Jockey) is a voyage deep into the world of synthesis, a dense thicket populated by drifting echoes and pulsating arpeggios.