katsumashi
what can I even say about this that I haven't already said about other claire albums. it's the first one I heard and also probably my favourite of hers
Favorite track: it feels foolish to care.
alec critten
I have to admit I'm a bit late to claire rousay's works (having only heard a few of her pieces prior to this), but this album is really special. While brief in runtime, its hypnotic combination of field recordings, string sections, and voice notes feels unresolved emotionally yet wholly realized as a bed of compelling sounds. Strikingly beautiful atmospheres on this one, and I look forward to going back and seeing what I've missed out on in rousay's oeuvre.
Favorite track: it feels foolish to care.
Giles
each small moment feels like nothing special, but the whole is an extremely compelling piece. it's a magical subtlety that also demonstrates that 'after' the avant garde there's yet more ways to form music that can make the people who've heard 'everything' feel something
Matt Nida
This blissfully beautiful record feels like it’s trying to tell me something important. I’m not sure what that is, but I’m happy to spend many hours trying to find out.
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When words trail off at the beginning of claire rousay’s “everything perfect is already here,” ornate instrumentation is waiting to fill a void left by the breakdown of language. Yet it becomes clear as we trace rousay’s collaged sonic pathway that breakdown, of meaning and also of melody, is also a place to rest. everything perfect… is made up of two extended compositions that cycle between familiarity and unknowing. There are seemingly infinite ways to feel in response to these pieces of music, which shift tone across their languid duration, earnest like a familiar song but unbound from the emotional didacticisms of lyrical voice and pop form.
rousay builds a fluid landscape around the acoustic contributions of Alex Cunningham (violin), Mari Maurice (electronics and violin), Marilu Donovan (harp), and Theodore Cale Schafer (piano), whose respective melodies weave gently in and out, sometimes steady, sometimes aching, sometimes receding altogether in deference to less overtly musical sounds. That is, percussive texture in the form of unvarnished samples and field recordings: the rattle and rustle and the stops and starts of life unfurling, voices sharing memories nearly out of reach, doors closing, wind against a microphone. Everything comes from somewhere in particular, possessing the veneer of the diaristic, but sound’s provenance is secondary here and so these details become tangled and fused. On this release I hear such details not as individual ornaments or stories but the collective architecture of the greater composition. It’s an architecture that is not quite formed and thus full of openings out to the world unfolding.
“The world unfolding,” that’s a kind way of saying change, movement, loss, transformation. Things rousay here indexes, not without shards of desire or pain, still somehow what I hear is coarse peace in the in-between. These two pieces sweep you away and then bring you to earth, but which is which, anyway? Where am I now? What is different outside of me? What is different inside of me? Um. I think. everything is perfect is already here, like the answers to these questions, is loose and beautiful in surprising ways.
The music guides a certain experience of the world around. In claire’s music there is this marriage—not just a pairing or juxtaposition but an interrelationship, an eventual confusion—of song/texture, narrative/abstraction, figure/ground. Everything comes from somewhere in particular but not just the voices, the field recordings, the what is being said or meant, what matters is “the where you are now.” There are so many ways of anchoring oneself in the present, some have to do with fantasy or storytelling and some with accepting what is.
These two compositions find peace between these modes. They sweep you away and then bring you to earth, but which is which, anyway? Their mode of feeling is inquisitive. Where am I now? What has changed outside of me? What has changed inside of me? The music, like the answers to these questions, is loose and beautiful in surprising ways.
credits
released April 22, 2022
All music by claire rousay
with alex cunningham (violin), mari maurice (electronics, violin), marilu donovan (harp), theodore cale schafer (piano).
artwork by katie fuller
layout by bartolomé sanson
mastered by stephan mathieu
1. it feels foolish to care (15:05)
2. everything perfect is already here (15:11)
supported by 251 fans who also own “everything perfect is already here”
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