He may not be Martha Stewart's favourite, but around these parts, Colin Stetson is a full cuppa. Today, the experimental multireedist has shared a feature-length visual album to accompany his gorgeous, guttural, glottal album The love it took to leave you, which arrived back in September.
If you've never had the pleasure of seeing one of Stetson's live performances (first of all, get on that), you can now witness a fraction of the alienesque environment the instrumentalist crafts IRL thanks to a 52-minute documentation from director Derrick Belcham and Jonathan Durand, which you can watch in full below.
Filmed in Stetson's hometown of Montreal at the historic Darling Foundry in 2023, the film is as close a replica of the artist's live show as can be created in 2D, with Stetson at the fore, harnessed and strapped with his various auditory equipment as visual projections react to Stetson's playing in real-time.
Stetson shared, "We were using the same live setup as I normally would to amplify — a full PA in the building's spaces — so we were really able to move the kind of air that I can move — really saturating the room, hitting the walls hard. And then we further fleshed it out."
Durand added:
I find that one of the most compelling aspects of Colin's music is how cinematic it is. If you close your eyes, it can really spark and fuel your imagination. But his performances themselves, If you watch them closely, contain richly evocative, cinematic storytelling — the way his body and instrument almost become fused together, and extended into space. What was exciting about this project wasn't just to document that process, and see how Derrick Belcham's lighting design and projections amplified Colin's playing, but to see how the physical structure of the Darling Foundry itself became another literal extension of Colin's music.
Watch The love it took to leave you below.