Colleen

Oh, to live in the utopia that Colleen's music so effortlessly inhabits. From the opening moment of ‘Summer Water' it is clear, doubtless in fact, that Cecile Schott's second album is a work of unutterable beauty. Constructed from echoing, reverberant live performance, a gripping experiment in making the best possible use of unusual stringed instruments, bells, and recorders, The Golden Morning Breaks is a meditative masterstroke which outshines her sample-dominated debut by a mile.

Part re-imagined John Dowland, part Harry Partch, the overall effect of Colleen's work here delivers abstract, ethereal beauty. Working largely with textures the music veers between sparse incoherence (‘The Heart Harmonicon') through exquisite transcendence (‘I'll Read You A Story') oddly reminiscent of Michael Hedges best work.

The Golden Morning Breaks is in equal proportions confused, rambling, impressionistic rather than coherent, and perhaps knowingly naïve, but bloomin' marvellous in spite of it all! I think/hope that secretly every musician wants to make a record this gently daring and impossibly idealistic...

Colleen appears at the ICA, London on Wednesday 27 July 2005.