Colin Andrew Sheffield
was born in El Paso in 1976 and lived in various cities in Texas prior to 2004, when he relocated to
the Seattle area. In 2012 he moved back to Texas and currently makes Austin his home. He is a self-taught drummer, playing in various collaborative situations in his home state before eventually making a total transition to electronic music.
After initially working with exclusively digital sources, in recent years, Sheffield has refined his approach and now focuses on the strict re-contextualization of other commercially available recordings. His aim is to distill the essential qualities of these works and
to then utilize that essence for new recordings. Usually only very brief sections of the original works are selected. These raw components are then contracted, expanded, layered, and/or otherwise processed until something new is forged. The resultant music is an
atmospheric soundscape, gradually shifting and unfolding, offering subtle nuance and quiet
restraint. His recordings often seem to have much in common with ambient electronic music, though are
equally akin to "plunderphonic" audio collage.
In 1998 Sheffield founded the Elevator Bath recording label
which has continually issued experimental works from a variety of artists from
the United States and abroad.
Sheffield has released a number of solo
recordings since 1998, including 2005's First Thus, his debut
long-player, as well as 2009's Signatures (via the Invisible Birds label), 2010's Slowly (on the Mystery Sea label of Belgium), 2012's Time Will Tell (on the Quiet World label of the UK), 2017's Endsheets (on the
Sinneslöschen label), and 2018's Repair Me Now (on Jason Lescalleet's Glistening Examples label). Sheffield will release an LP on the Auf Abwegen label in 2021. |