Colin Andrew Sheffield - Serenade (2025)

"Strings swell up from the bottom of a dark pool of water, drones vibrate like the hull of a doomed cargo plane, the ghosts of ghosts walk in circles across sheet-metal… he conjures these scenes and more like them here."
— Matt Korvette, Yellow Green Red

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The twelve jagged audio collages found on Colin Andrew Sheffield's "Serenade" shift from blurry abstractions to choppy sound art to mournful plundered passages, always with the singular stylistic approach the composer has developed over the last 25+ years of activity.

As the follow-up to his previous full-length release, the critically acclaimed "Images" (2023), "Serenade" picks up where that album left off, although with an expanded sonic palette of funk, soul, jazz, and library records as his primary sources. Of course, the finished work bears little resemblance to the original components as Sheffield opts to draw out the mystery and minutiae from his building blocks rather than simply rearrange the chosen snippets. In these dense new compositions, hidden details come into relief as loops develop and morph while elusive melodies emerge from the mist before vanishing into thin air.

From the beginning stages in which samples were gathered, until the final product was at last completed, Sheffield spent around eighteen months stitching together the tracks for "Serenade". Rather than sounding labored or stale, however, much of the record has a kind of ramshackle quality about it, with a DIY aesthetic at its heart. The characteristic looseness of these pieces could be attributed to Sheffield's use of vintage sampling hardware, but the presence of imperfect loops and rough textures was both a conscious decision and an inevitable part of his distinctive creative process.

Ultimately "Serenade" is a collection of miniatures exploring Sheffield's interest in bending found sounds to his will, in creating a certain ambiance of open-ended intrigue, and thereby describing a hazy landscape — one perhaps flecked with distant clouds and obscure lights in the sky: a paean for the inexplicable.