by Ivy Skarda (@ivyskarda)
Anyone who’s had an early morning commute downtown knows the feeling – bloodshot, crimson-stained eyes searching for quiet reprieve as dawn creeps over the skyline, the windows of skyscrapers flickering awake with light as you travel further into the concrete veins of the city. It’s a warm, nude feeling of in-betweenness, as your tired body and soul attempt to bask in the glow of an urban, artificial sense of perpetual motion. The day has only just begun.
a little death, the latest project from Los Angeles-based sound collagist claire rousay, finds itself in the ambient crevices between daylight and darkness – meticulously constructed from field recordings taken by Rousay at fleeting moments of dusk. A car engine sputters to life on “conditional love,” a soft voice hushedly whispers under “just,” a piercing, metallic ringing ricochets throughout “doubt,” and “somewhat burdensome” ends up as the album’s closest resemblance of conventional structure as lo-fi guitar noodlings become a backdrop to the terrestrial buzz of twilight.
Named after a wine bar on the strip in San Antonio that she used to frequent, a little death finds Rousay after a year of sobriety. The sharp, precise nature of the arrangements feel particularly clear-headed in the wake of her healing process – cutting through the deadening haze of the night for soundscapes that feel wide-eyed and perennially sleepless, a fitting soundtrack for those bloodshot pupils on the early-morning tram to work. Rousay gets crucial assistance from close collaborator more eaze (Mari Maurice) on violin for several tracks, as well as smaller atmospheric flourishes from frequent instrumental contributors such as M. Sage and Gretchen Korsmo that pad out her quietly frenetic electronics into something more wide-reaching and earthly.
Ambiance is never really ambiance throughout Rousay’s work. Her compositions never leave you face-to-face with dead air, instead vying to intertwine competing threads of intimate, bleary field recordings to construct an emotionally resonant story from its most bare ingredients. “somehow,” a little death’s fourth track, is ultimately the one that haunts you for the longest. As ebbing tides of strings and subtle electronics give way to a cacophony of overlapping voice recordings, one piques out above the rest – a woman with a thick accent begins to talk about a time when she found herself jobless, homeless and distraught, fraught with troubling memories as her voice trembles. She recalls sending an Instagram DM to a musician who was touring in her area, hoping to get a spot on her guest list to no avail. She gets frustrated, turning the blame on herself as the rejection seems to send her deeper into her spiral.
“And two years later, I’m here… this person was claire rousay.” She giggles. a little death consists of stories from the other side, as the day turns to night and the tale gets reset for another day. There’s something so beautiful about the temporal.