Name: Faith Coloccia
Occupation: Musician, artist
Nationality: American
Current release: Faith Coloccia teams up with Daniel Menche on their new collaborative album Smelter, out via Room40.
Hometown recommendations:
From my hometown: A visit to Thousand Palms Preserve is highly recommended. And Tahquitz canyon.
From where I live right now: Shinglemill/Fern Cove.
Topic that I am passionate about but rarely get to talk about: I am a farm steward and I walk through a forest trail to the farm where I work. I am interested in soil and minerals and mycorrhizal networks, and the ways plants communicate, and in how forests and farms can exist with and help each other. I am interested and indebted to the history and current story of the land I reside upon.  I have had a large garden at our home for about 12 years, and every year I fail and try again, and have small successes, and create challenges for myself, and feed my family from it, and am able to fill my child’s lunch box with food from our yard. It is hard work and I love it!
I am also always on the look out for and in love with unintentional archives. Old sewing kits, button collections in jars, embroidery journals, old tool boxes, ravine trash piles. I love the way they accidentally encapsulate time, and someone's personality, life, values and memories.

If you enjoyed this Faith Coloccia interview and would like to know more about her music, visit her on Instagram.



What were some of your earliest collaborations? How do you look back on them with hindsight?

Some of my earliest collaborations were when I started making music with Everlovely Lightningheart.



My friend Chris Badger and I started this music project in a college class called “Praxis”, we collaborated with friends, musicians and artists, situations, and even things like train tunnels - the building or space being a sonic collaborator in the compositions. The people we collaborated with, their energy and ideas were essential to the project.

One of my earliest collaborations outside of Everlovely Lightningheart was with my friend Alex Barnett. We walked through the snow in Chicago recording trains, and recorded our first song together in Oakeater’s unheated practice space.



This lead to Alex and I making collaborative records together as “Barnett + Coloccia.”



There are many potential models for collaboration, from live performances and jamming/producing in the same room together up to file sharing. Which of these do you prefer – and why?  

When I first started making music, everything was improvised and live. It wasn’t until I started composing for piano and using a 4 track that my collaborations became more planned out.

I used to prefer collaborating live in a studio, now I prefer making collaborations over giant swaths of time, ideas falling upon each other like sediment and seasonal debris, layer upon layer, filtering down into strata of time resulting in long form creations.

How did this particular collaboration come about?

This collaboration came about while organizing my disorganized cassette recordings, mostly made during the pandemic.

Daniel and I had collaborated before, performed live together, and toured together.



Music making is more challenging for me time-wise since having a child. People are always asking me “Do you still even make music??”

We had just seen Daniel for a visit in 2023, and he asked me how my music making was going, so I sent him some piano compositions from 2019, and some of my wintery field recordings hoping he would use his new mysterious modular experiments on the sounds.

What did you know about each other before working together? Describe your creative partner in a few words, please.

I have known Daniel since about 2010 (?) We met after his show in Seattle, I had loved his recordings before previously meeting him.

He had a camera, and we started to become friends talking about photography and hiking and exploring. My partner and I would go to see him in Portland and he would take us hiking while recording. He took us to the place where he made Kataract and Raw Fall.



We stood behind a massive waterfall getting pummeled by organic sub bass. What a cool friend!

Description of Daniel: Daniel is 100% himself! He must adventure, experiment and explore. He must be in motion, full of ideas and a love of living. The way he hears and sculpts sound is exceptional. The way he wants to document and hold onto sounds, stretch them and transform them to see what is left of the signal is one of the reasons I love working with him.

What do you generally look for in a collaborator and what made you want to collaborate with each other specifically?

Patience! Being willing to experiment and fail, a love of and curiosity of life and living. Value of process and intrinsic motivations.

Tell me a bit about your current instruments and tools, please. In which way do they support creative exchange and collaborations with others?  

I use a Steinway mini-upright piano from 1940, cassette recorders, Tascam 4-track, sm57 microphone, iPhone built in voice recorder, compression pedal, Blue Sky reverb, a Line 6 looping pedal.

Before you started making music together, did you in any form exchange concrete ideas, goals, or strategies? Generally speaking, what are your preferences when it comes to planning vs spontaneity in a collaboration?

I believe the only ideas we had in mind were using the piano compositions, and then the long form interpretations Daniel made from them as the foundation of the record.

We then started to narrow field recordings down to a “water in various forms” theme.  I prefer plans full of curated spontaneity.

Describe the process of working on Smelter, please. What was different from your expectations and what did the other add to the music?

For this release I worked in 15 minute to one hour intervals, sometimes bringing our “protools computer” out of our studio to work on edits while my child was sleeping. I started to learn how to use protools during the pandemic, and I love editing the tiniest little pieces of syllables and vowels, and switching them out with other vowels in the source material.

Daniel would send me his beautiful long form mutations of my piano tracks, and I would chop them up and arrange them.

My expectations were to get a record out quickly in a couple weeks!  And then it ended up taking about 2.5 years.

What are your thoughts on the need for compromise vs standing by one's convictions? How did you resolve potential disagreements in this collaboration?

We had a couple disagreements surrounding me doing the final mix with Scott.

Daniel records and mixes by himself, which I respect! Though for myself: I love the collaboration that can happen with a mixing engineer and/or producer, I highly value the process. And also Scott has so much knowledge, and professional ears and technical ability! And wonderful studio gear that I don’t have, and he has TIME! I have a limited amount of time and gear, and I also enjoy learning from Scott’s knowledge.

Daniel wanted me to have full control of the mixing process, but then he was confused as to why I would choose to have Scott do the final mix. We had a lot of discussions back and forth, and I also offered to scrap the whole thing! (Maybe over-standing my conviction and also running out of time?)

But then we came to a compromise once I explained why I worked with Scott, and also we took off a problematic song and replaced it with another mixed song, and it all worked out.

Was/Is this collaboration fun – does it need to be?

The most fun part for me was unearthing long lost cassette recordings. I usually work on music in the winter when I am not working at my farm job.

So I love sitting in our studio in the snow compressing cassette audio, to see what I recorded 2 to 3 years prior that I forgot about.

Do you find that thanks to this collaboration, you changed certain parts of your process or your outlook on certain creative aspects?

Yes, I have had to decide where to allocate energy and resources!

I just finished another collaboration (this one with Tashi Dorji), and so I think returning my energy to my solo work for a while will be a good way for me to use my time, and I will have a new perspective on working alone.

[Read our Tashi Dorji interview]

Collaborating with one's heroes can be a thrill or a cause for panic. Do you have any practical experience with this and what was it like?

Yes, I have worked with many heroes!  I am honored that I was able to collaborate with the late Philip Jeck.



When I first talked with him about the idea, a friend of mine actually told me “oh, he’ll never do that collaboration with you” (!), and so when Philip did collaborate with me, I was relieved and also felt like I was reading my own interior compass right in wanting to collaborate with him.

When Touch wanted to put out the record at first thought they had the wrong email address and were actually writing to someone else!

So in terms of my practical experience I would say that I have had to put out a lot of my own records for various reasons, and have not been asked or courted by many for a record, so if someone wants to work with me on a release I am always surprised and honored (thank you Room40!). And I feel very fortunate to have been able to learn from and work with Philip and with Touch.

One of my first experiences working with a hero was getting to record with Randall Dunn. I guess I have “process” and “sonic” heroes.



I feel like I was still very new to making music when I first recorded with him, and it was my first time recording on a giant grand piano. I had many moments where I questioned if I deserved to be there, possibly wasting everyone's time! It took me many years and also talking with people like Randall to realize that I had something to offer.

My current sonic hero is Scott Evans, he is so fun to collaborate with, and great to work with. After becoming a parent I have had doubts about making music again, and so working with him has been very helpful, and also a big part of why this collab with Daniel even exists!

My first collaboration with a hero was when Mamiffer collaborated with the Finnish band Circle.



We recorded in an old church that Jussi (from Circle) used to go to as a child in Pori. The organ there is called the Paschen organ. By then I was starting to understand myself as a musician, and could see that Circle lived their lives entirely through art just like myself and my partner did, so it made sense that we would collaborate.

[Read our Circle interview]

I started to understand collaboration as a much needed form of growing and sharing. Collaboration became a form of self made critique and education, and I’m always into the friendship and connection aspect of it too.