colleen: the weighing of the heart

11 track CD album in hardback book-size format with 8 page lyric inlay - designed by renowned Italian illustrator Iker Spozio (Tex La Homa, Delia Derbyshire, Mark Fry, Hauschka, Damon & Naomi). The Weighing Of The Heart is number No.4 in the new 2L Library Series - a highly collectible catalogue of hardback CD albums designed to be stored in your bookcase. Celebrating a decade since Everyone Alive Wants Answers, her 2003 long-playing debut, The Weighing of the Heart finds the revivified Parisienne, now Spanish resident Cécile Schott (aka Colleen) gracing a new label and inhabiting a refreshing, incandescent new musical landscape, filled with plucked bass and treble violas de gamba and the more orthodox sounds of classical guitar, clarinet, piano and organ, while minimal drum kit, frame drum, toy gamelan and various bells and maracas add their percussive colours. The album’s 11 finely wrought essays are influenced as much by the output of mavericks such as Arthur Russell, Moondog and Brigitte Fontaine as by the traditions of Central Asia, Indonesia, South America and, most important of all, Africa with its wealth of kora and guitar music and percussion. Yet the result sounds utterly unique – an absorbing fusion of the delicately spun and the rhythmically persuasive, embracing a pastoralism that is both lyrical yet rooted to the earth; at once hazily baroque yet accessible and universal. Lyrically, The Weighing of the Heart offers a series of elemental tableaux vivants, the songs’ haiku-like stanzas populated by ravens, fields, wind, reeds, earth, planets and stars – subject matter partly inspired by Cécile moving away from the city and taking up residence in a Spanish town “three minutes walk from the sea, surrounded by hills and mountains…where you can actually get away from civilization really quickly and easily.” Written, played, produced, recorded and mixed in its entirety by Cécile, The Weighing of the Heart was captured in quotidian circumstances, at home and in a disused olive shop which could only be employed very late at night, when the noisy bustle of Spanish life had finally ceased. That intense, solitary, after-hours ambience permeates this inimitably characterful album, lending it a palpable, pin-drop atmosphere that is all its own. The Weighing Of The Heart is number No.4 in the new 2L Library Series - a highly collectable catalogue of hardback CD albums designed to be stored in your bookcase.