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***Cécile Schott's 2003 debut, Everyone Alive Wants Answers, was hypnotizing mix of sampled recordings, found sounds, and lullabies mined from the chaos of recordings never meant to be heard together. Schott delivers an equally stunning achievement of meditative beauty on her latest release; with nary a beat, The Golden Morning Breaks embraces, abandons, and prepares for the warm jets, swathing listeners in a sea of comfort through its simultaneous familiarity and distinctness. However, The Golden Morning Breaks was recorded live with acoustic instruments, some familiar (an earlier life in noise rock and pop bands was called back up to memory) and others learned for this recording. With a strong knowledge of current rock and electronic music, Schott picked up on late 16th-Century lute songs by John Dowland (from whom the album takes its name), 17th-Century compositions for viola da gamba (an ancestor to the cello), 20th-Century composers, kora techniques of West Africa, and Indonesian folk and gamelan. Composing required a new approach-- through a process of building and shedding-- and even Schott could never have guessed what the final album would sound like; her intention was to find distinctive sound qualities in both everyday instruments, like guitars, and those rarely used, like her 19th century glass harmonicon, a delicate-sounding glass glockenspiel. The Golden Morning Breaks contains recordings rife with ideas and emotion, songs without traditional beginnings and ends. Rather, what makes the album so special is Schott's intuitive ability to create beauty through simplicity. By avoiding the strict formal approach to writing and recording, Colleen keys into the more primal magical realism in the common every day. |
