Colleen - Colleen Et Les Boites De Musique
[The Leaf Label]

Colleen Et Les Boites De Musique (Colleen and the Music Boxes translated) is at once dreamlike and uncomfortable.

The concept alone is a magical one, as the title suggests, Colleen played and manipulated the reels of a collection of music boxes, hitting them with mallets and playing them with her fingers. The result is a dive into unknown nostalgia, of broken memories and antique toys.

Tracks like ‘Bicycle Bells’ meander through difficult passages of disjointed plucking and clanging, whereas ‘The Sad Panther’contains more manipulated music box sounds, with melodies stretched out into long drones of eerie melody, like empty swings at twilight and doors that bang shut of their own accord.

Others dance out tinny melodies to enchant and charm, ‘A Bear is Trapped’ twists ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ into grotesque shapes like it were the soundtrack to a scene from a classic American slasher film.

Much of the album cannot stand alone, this is very much a project that has to be taken whole, even on a conceptual level, one track could not carry the same aura Colleen has managed to draw out of the music boxes. It is an experiment with sound, with how much practical limitation can be stretched; in this case, how much can one get out of a pile of rusty music boxes.