Collectress fill their music with stories and pictures. In performance the sound of their music is met by strong visual play. Enormous paper egg shells with signature portraits to be cut through to the sound of bird’s eggs hatching. A marching cat playing the flute. A woman wearing a ringing telephone hat which plays Beethoven when she answers it. A washing line un-pegging. An animated cockroach moustache. They have fun with the ridiculous and enjoy its suggestiveness.
Their collective ethos, aesthetic and approach are inspired and informed by the practices which complement their performing lives: visual art, composition for film and TV, dance for camera, music informatics and free improvisation. Collectress are a band of process and resourcefulness, and like you to hear as they make. Their broad and dense experimental structures utilise voice, toy instruments and found sound samples alongside layers of more traditional, often romantic, strings, keys and woodwind - violin, viola, cello, flute, piano and guitar. They rail against the airbrushing of an autotuned music industry and record most of their music live, in situ and as a group.
Described as possessed Brontë sisters teasing an unsuspecting dinner party (Foxy Digitalis), Collectress are a quartet of long-term musical collaborators from London and Brighton. Their music treads a joyful line between the intricate and organic, with a nod to everyone from Philip Glass to Bach to John Adams, improvisors like The Necks to lo-fi chamber groups such as Rachels. They play and write with a sense of narrative, drawing the listener into a thoroughly distinctive and beguiling world of experimental chamber music.
Collectress are:
Quinta (violin, viola, saw, keyboard, vocals, recorder),
Caroline Weeks (flute, vocals, guitar, keyboard, recorder),
Rebecca Waterworth (‘cello, keyboard, vocals)
Alice Eldridge (‘cello, custom software, field recordings, vocals).
