Colleen + Surgeons Girl

Two incredible artists play analog synth inspired sets – evocative, spacey and powerfully emotive.

French artist Cécile Schott aka Colleen plays her recent ambient album Le jour et la nuit du réel, composed entirely for analogue synths. Schott is known for her fearless willingness to explore new sounds and new ways of creating music as a solo performer. Over the course of seven critically acclaimed albums, she has consistently reinvented herself, first by taking acoustic instruments out of their usual context, then through her avant-pop electronic explorations.

Her growing passion for synthesis, bolstered by her collaborations with synth manufacturer Moog, have led to her brilliant eighth album, which is a suite of gorgeously hypnotic sonic transformations exploring the complexity of our relationship with reality and the cycles of day and night. This is beautiful, mysterious, contemplative music, by turns spacey and dynamic. 

Bristol-based Surgeons Girl opens the concert, fresh from her extraordinary collaboration with the Paraorchestra that lit up the opening night of the Beacon. Surgeons Girl brings startling imagination and sonic maturity to the soundworlds she creates, drawing on a whole range of influences, from the likes of Laurel Halo, Caterina Barbieri and Dasha Rush. 

The reflective, immersive extraterrestrial synth explorations of A Violet Sleep marked her extraordinary dream-like debut. She followed this up with The Empress Moss on London label Inside Out Records in 2021 and Sever on Lapsus Records in 2022. This is stunningly evocative and inventive music.