Colin Stetson’s new solo album, ‘The Love It Took To Leave You’, is out now via Invada Records (Worldwide, excl. N America) and Envision Records (North America). An Instagram AR filter will be available that will add unsettling visual dimensions to the album cover.
To mark the release, a new video has been shared for ‘So Say The Soaring Bullbats’. The track, played on solo contrabass clarinet, Stetson explains, “…is like the chiming in of the Greek chorus. They’re the witnesses to countless stories, the background of a painting in the foreground of their own.”
The immersive sonics and surreal stereo imaging on the album come from years of experimentation and evolving methods of recording. Playing in larger and larger venues over the last few years Colin and live producer/engineer, Jonas Werwijnen, who he’s been working with for the last decade, have been finessing the art of not just tuning the room, but incorporating it into performance, integrating it into the compositions themselves.
In the constant quest to render the alive, real-time sensation of performance in recording—to seize the music in all of its spatial and relational glory, they began scouting industrial sites for buildings with particular resonances and massive reverberant dimensions. They settled on The Darling Foundry, a former metalworks facility in Montreal, now transformed into a 3500m3 contemporary art complex, with a voluminous main room that still maintains its raw architecture of brick, concrete and steel.
“We were using the same live setup as I normally would to amplify—a full PA in the building’s spaces—so we were really able to move the kind of air that I can move—really saturating the room, hitting the walls hard. And then we further fleshed it out.”
Setting up for a week in January 2023, the building became a sonic and situational accomplice, another instrument reacting to his, allowing amplification beyond normal acoustic limits—able to achieve the supersaturation and vibration that matched Colin’s vision and themes in the music. Several pieces on the album were actually improvised and created on the spot, inspired by this context. Even in this complex technical process, the story and song on the final mixes always shine through—invisible of the means, but consequentially enriched by them.
With each album reaching new creative heights, Colin remains delighted by every new act of creation and launching it into the world:
“I feel the same thing whenever I make a record—I love them. As soon as I’m done with it, I don’t wish I could go back and change everything. I adore them; I love the process of making it. There’s aspects of it that’s a snapshot into my life. It’s how I tie myself to my own memory, but I do view them as very separate from myself. Once a record is a record and once it’s an object and it’s outside, and I don’t mean just a physical object—when the song, when the music itself is an object that another person can interact with, then it’s not me anymore. It goes straight into the heart and mind-centres, and the body-centres of people. It’s a game of emotional telephone, a message in a bottle; and how much can I imbue this vessel with my human experience, so that it remains in some way intact when it finds its way to another person’s experience.”
Check it out the video for So Say The Soaring Bullbats, below:
Find out more via Stetson’s Website or Facebook
Purchase the album here
TRACKLIST
Side A
1. The love it took to leave you – 7:45
2. The Six – 6:41
3. The Augur – 3:00
Side B
4. Hollowing – 3:19
5. To think we knew from fear – 3:39
6. Malediction – 9:22
7. Green and grey and fading light – 4:23
Side C
8. Strike your forge and grin – 21:52
Side D
9. Ember – 3:14
10. So say the soaring bullbats – 5:14
11. Bloodrest – 4:37
