Claire Rousay - Everything Perfect Is Already Here

Claire Rousay never stops. World of Echo opened its doors at the tail end of 2018, shortly before Rousay started officially releasing music. Since then, i count nearly 30 different sets of recordings to which she has lent her name, either alone or in collaboration. By anyone's standards, that's an astonishing achievement. The ontology of that recorded output is essentially process driven, a series of works that hinge on collage, though make gestures to the varying practices of modern composition, ambient aesthetics, the more trad. formalism of emo and shoegaze, and so-called non-musics in which the voice and found sound is preferenced. This latest record, two 15 minute suites with a diaristic quality, represents a uniting of nearly all these sensibilities, and sees Rousay joined by several other musicians whom she appears to sample in an incidental/verite type manner. The impression is as if she has just walked into a room where a piano, violin or harp just so happened to be playing, while the rest of life buzzes and creaks around them. Since process in the service of narrative seems to be Rousay's MO, it's tempting to debate just what the message might be here. This certainly feels like it's music about something. The poetic phrasing of the track titles does a degree of the legwork here - they're enigmatic and ostensibly emotional, a trick she obviously borrows from emo, and hang in the air implacably. What is more interesting to me, though, is that the construction of these pieces seem to comment on the role music and sound plays in shaping our lives, experiences, interactions. It's all around and in us at all times, intersecting or disrupting or simply just existing. Rousay's artful process of collage appears to reflect this relationship, arresting the duality of conscious and unconscious sound. It certainly makes for attentive listening. Crucially, it's also very beautiful and endlessly engaging.