Colleen "Le Jour Et La Nuit Du Rèel"
Le jour et la nuit du réel (“The day and the night of reality” in French) is an album of parallels and contrasts. Schott’s first purely instrumental work since 2007’s Les ondes silencieuses, and her first double album, Le jour et la nuit du réel started as an album of songs with lyrics in the style of her previous album The Tunnel and the Clearing before gradually morphing into wordless suites of compositions divided into movements. Schott realized that synthesis was the best expressive tool at her disposal to grapple with a theme that seemed to be constantly on her mind: the impossibility of truly grasping all facets of reality, especially one’s own emotional reality and that of others. Each movement within a suite employs different synthesis settings, but with distinctive chords and motifs that provide a throughline, guiding the listener through shifting sonic landscapes. Schott elaborates: “To me, the capacity of synthesis to alter – subtly or radically – the physical embodiment in sound of the same series of notes is akin to how, when given new information about a person or a situation, we can reevaluate our initial perception of what we thought was the “reality” of that person or situation, sometimes drastically so.”
The album’s construct falls into two larger sections, day and night. A kaleidoscopic range of sounds speckle the album’s seven suites, aiming to translate the range and nuance of emotions, both deeply personal and communal, and the complexity of identity, as we shift from day to night. Daytime opens with more friction, tension, and abrasive timbres emulating the invigoration of daylight with “Subterranean” and “The long wait”, before softening into the warm luminance of “To hold and to be held” and “Mon coeur”. “Be without being seen” functions as a twilight transition zone, first melancholy, then threatening, mimicking the fact that nighttime tends to warp our sense of reality, often making it more intense. “Les parenthèses enchantées,” named for a French idiom that, roughly interpreted, means “a beautiful moment destined to end soon”, plunges the listener into the second half, night. The descent into slower, more melancholy textures and longer trails of delay slips into the pulsating, bottomless recesses of “Night looping”, a direct reference to Schott’s own recurrent insomnia.