Something changed when Cécile Schott started performing her new material live. The frequencies hit differently, especially the bass, in a way her earlier music never did. Where the French musician, better known as Colleen, once built delicate, suspended worlds from chamber-like loops and acoustic samples, her latest album, Libres antes del final, moves with a new urgency, one that dancing audiences in Philadelphia, New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles felt too. Traveling with just a backpack and borrowing a Moog Matriarch in each city, Schott’s recent US tour became something even more personal, ending with a drive down Highway 101 and celebrating her 50th birthday on the California coast. “It was many things rolled into one,” she says. “Very, very life-affirming.”
Written and recorded on a Moog Matriarch, the five-track album, released on Thrill Jockey, unfolds as a sequence of distinct compositions. During its creation, Schott was inspired by the Detroit techno duo, Drexciya, whose own fixation on water flows like an undercurrent through the album. It opens with invitation, Mis armas se habían caído al suelo (My weapons had fallen to the floor), drawing the listener in before building toward Antidoto (Antidote), what Schott calls “the joyful centerpiece,” and ultimately drifting into the brooding darkness of the title track. “It’s always been my thing to go for liquid sounds when working with acoustics,” says Schott. “But with synthesis, the compositions just started to flow.”
Libres antes del final translates to Free Before The End, a concept Schott has wholeheartedly embraced in recent years. “When I was a little kid, I absolutely loved swimming underwater; it came naturally to me,” she says, recalling memories of her mom accompanying her to the local pool. “But at school, we had to take swimming classes, and little by little, I started to lose my confidence.” When Schott turned 18, the lessons ended, and she vowed never to swim again, developing a deep fear of water. In the years since, she’s lived in San Sebastian and Barcelona, coastal Spanish cities where the sea tempted her to reconsider.
In 2024, Schott played her 250th concert in the Azores, a Portuguese archipelago set deep in the Atlantic Ocean. While there, she joined a birdwatching group led by a local researcher. “I went on this boat trip and the crew mentioned that when the temperatures are warm, the dolphins are willing to have interactions with humans,” she says. “I was thinking, ‘Imagine having the opportunity to swim alongside dolphins, one of the most powerful experiences you could have while living on Earth, and not being able to because you never learned to face your fear.’” Exactly a month later, Schott took the plunge and booked swimming lessons with a sports psychologist in Barcelona.
“The first lesson gave me such a high,” she says. “It was one of the best presents I could have given myself.” Two months later, Schott was swimming further and further from shore, allowing her feet to leave the ground and trusting that she’d find her way back. “When you overcome a fear that was deep-seated within you, it opens something up. It’s the realization that we’re often our own worst enemy, preventing ourselves from daring to try that thing that we’re afraid of.” Schott believes that the more liberated an artist feels, the more it fuels the creative process. “I felt this inner world opening up and it immediately branched out into other things for me,” she says, adding that she’s reconnected with table tennis, stripped away the mental inhibitions that kept her from dancing and signed up for an all-women self-defense class near her home in Barcelona. “It helped me to translate this need for a more embodied way of living into a physical, rhythmical sound.”
Schott views her trajectory in the music industry, flying under the mainstream, as a way of having true artistic freedom. “I don’t want to say my music is autobiographical,” she says. “But to some extent it is. The tools happen to be what I feel best expresses my musical loves and what I’m going through at that particular time.” A pivotal moment came in 2010, when Schott discovered Arthur Russell. “It was life-changing,” she says. “He was my first role model in terms of someone who explored a danceable side to their music but also a full-on compositional approach.” From the acoustic samples of her debut album, Everyone Alive Wants Answers, to the analog synthesis and rhythmic pulses of Libres antes del final, Schott’s music has continually reinvented itself — a restlessness that extends beyond the studio.
“I wouldn’t say I’m an analog purist. The computer helped me become a musician, but I think my DIY ethos, which comes from the way my parents brought me up, has had an impact on me as a person and a musician,” says Schott, who’s lived her adult life based on the values of DIY. She makes her own clothing and furnishings, uses organic materials and is selective about the musical equipment she buys. Her studio, built from recycled pine wood, is just seven square metres. “Recently, I was thinking about the way my parents would take us on holiday. My mom would stuff the camper van with cans and preserves and we didn’t go to camping sites; we parked where we could on the road,” she says. “It took me years, but now I can clearly see the connection. It’s how I’ve been able to make a living as a musician, being very self-sufficient and minimal.”
Those road trips also gave Schott her earliest musical memories. As a small child, she remembers connecting with the cassette tapes her parents played on long road trips and absorbing the sounds of their record collection. “There’s something about music, probably because it’s vibrating in the air, that makes it easier to accompany us in our lives than any other art form,” says Schott. She references a Lee Perry tape her parents bought by accident. “I reckon I was three years old when I first heard it, and of course, at that age you can’t analyze what you’re listening to, but it was this feeling of pure joy. It was already doing something for my soul.”
The album’s central idea of freedom before the end took on an even stronger resonance when Schott’s father died after a rapid decline caused by Alzheimer’s disease two days before the record’s release. “It was a weird twist of life that it should happen at that point, but it was actually really life-affirming,” says Schott. “When somebody goes like that, especially if the disease has caught them earlier in their life, it’s a reminder to be a little more grateful for the luck that we have when we’re in good health and when we have a functioning mind and body.” Schott says the experience has made her more appreciative of her neurons, her brain health and her ability to play music live. “Because it’s such an intense disease that strips the person of their awareness, freedom is not attainable anymore,” she says. “At the end of the day, it almost makes sense that my dad had to go at that moment, to act as a reminder to be grateful and get on with life in the best possible way.”
It’s an outlook that’s carried Schott through the darker moments of her career. In 2021, she nearly gave up on playing live, feeling fragile and stressed by the administrative side of things. “But now, I’m lucky enough to have a setup where I feel confident and I’m grateful for the renewal of my audience,” she says. Schott recalls a moment at the Rewire festival in the Hague, where longtime fans turned to each other mid-set and said they couldn’t believe they were dancing to Colleen. “That was my dream,” she says. “That’s exactly what it’s about for me right now.” She’s also touched by concerts where her listeners have brought their children along. “I’ve had people come with their 20-year-old daughter and say, ‘We used to play your music when she was a toddler,’ which is insane and beautiful. It makes growing older actually enjoyable.”
For Schott, that relationship with her audience feels especially vital now. “We live in such a messed-up historical moment for so many people on the planet and I think we all feel powerless because institutions are failing people,” she says. “If I can have an impact through my music and it can be a small beam of light, that’s unbelievable.” That energy is already feeding Schott’s ideas for the next album. “My plan is to go heavily into rhythm with drum machines and a modular setup,” she says. “I don’t plan on giving up the more emotional and compositional side of things, but it’s going to be fun. I think the audience will follow because they can still feel it’s me; it’s completely authentic.”
Colleen performs “Antídoto” live at Elevator Sound, Barcelona:
Libres antes del final is out now on Thrill Jockey
Order via: Bandcamp | Thrill Jockey
Colleen Dates
26 May Silent Green – BERLIN, DE
10 June ICA – LONDON, UK
11 June Botanique – BRUSSELS, BE
20 June Infinito Delicias – MADRID, ES (tickets not available yet)
22 June – Waking Life festival – CRATO, PT