Collerette — Trip To Casa

A trip, a journey: one that we would guess to be prodigiously intellectual once having listened to this amazing Swiss trio nestled (sunken?) in a deep valley in the canton of Grisons. We are in the Romansh part of Switzerland, more exactly in the town of Chur. One has to visualize the landscape, otherwise one cannot fully grasp the nature of "Trip to Casa"'s creative leap. The town is surrounded by 3000 meter mountains of which one rarely sees the peaks. At the bottom of the valley, parallel to the highway that speeds towards the prestigious resort towns of Davos, Arosa and St. Moritz, there is also a river, frozen over with ice from November to April because sunshine is sporadic and temperatures seldom go above 0°C in these lower valleys of the Alps. Brrrrrr! With so little warmth, one would be quick to assume that "Casa" is something that it is not, i.e. Casablanca. Even if the trip in question is over many miles, it does not involve a shift to the southern hemispheres, not to Morocco or anywhere else. Indeed, the "Casa" in question is their home. A cathedral made from rock and ice from which Collerette develops their pointillist and diffracted universe. Their music is therefore a true "trip" where the powerless listener witnesses the taking apart of the diktat of melody. In addition, Hans-Peter Tschudi, Peter Kraus and Jens Wolframm (all students at the Chur School of Nursing) perversely make simple, beautiful and detailed melodies that are all the better for them to then mess up. One refers to the influences of "Andorra" by Caribou, every so often to the minimalist house music of Rajko Müller (Isolée) or to the more military style of Underworld. A scholarly, surgical deconstruction that is necessary due to the absence of any perspective. There are those who blow up mountains with explosives, Collerette prefer useing the fine instruments of a stonemason whose work turns solid rock into fine lace.