Colin Self

Colin Self (b. 1987 Oregon, USA) is an artist, composer, and puppeteer based between Brooklyn, New York and Berlin, Germany. They create music, performances, and new systems for interfacing with the human spirit, across a spectrum between the living and deceased. As many of their practices revolve around the temporary assembly of communities, their work envelops collaborative and dialogical experiments into play.

Self has been running XOIR since 2013, an alternative modality of group singing, and co-founded TIAPS, a performance school in 2023 with their collaborator Monica Mirabile. Their most recent commissions include Where The Souls Go (2024), a play commissioned by the New Theater Hollywood, Kompass (2023), a trilogy composed for the Hannover State Opera, and Tip the Ivy (2022), an opera that premiered at Performance Space NY in 2022.  Last year they were a resident artist at Callie’s Berlin and will be an artistic fellow at La Becque in Autumn 2024.

respite ∞ levity for the nameless ghost in crisis, aka r∞L4nGc, the artist’s third album, culminates years of spiritual and artistic wandering. After the release of their last album Siblings in 2018, followed by the Orphans EP the year later, Self made a conscious exile from music, in part driven by lockdown in 2020 and being “forced in stillness and slowness within myself,” according to Self. In their solitude, Self turned their impulses towards community building, now halted from taking root in the physical world of galleries and underground clubs where they’re so often found, into the spirit world.After being asked to compose a piece for the Berlin State Choir in response to Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, which arose for Self countless feelings of resentment towards the heaviness of Catholic mass and its formal use of Latin, the artist began composing new material in Polari, a slantwise form of English deployed as far back as the 16th century, which allowed those within queer subcultures to communicate with one another, especially under surveillance. r∞L4nGc also reincorporates Self’s wider artistic interests, particularly their devotion to the craft of doll making. Their residency at Callie’s, which featured Self’s dolls dancing to earlier versions of the music now featured on this record, was critical to their practice of inviting ghostly presences into the music.As such, r∞L4nGc is the most integrated vision of Self’s singular artistic practice to date, incorporating their diverse talents and conjuring a sonic adventure that will carry listeners into realms they may have never before imagined, with Self always at their side.