Quiet “ambient” radical, claire rousay sifts her sensurreal style into a sublime and keenly awaited long player that carefully frays the fabric of time and space for Shelter Press.
Lingering in the listing wake of her oneiric cartography ’17 Roles (All Mapped Out)’ (2021) and last year's breakthrough "A Softer Focus”, claire huddles with mates (Alex Cunningham (violin), mari maurice (electronics and violin), Marilu Donovan (harp), and Theodore Cale Schafer (piano)) on ‘Everything Perfect is Always Here’ - an exceedingly tactile investigation of the fissures between improvised/composed sound and waking/dream life.
rousay slips into a role of conductor or band-leader, arranging the elements provided by her collaborators into a golden hour glow of delicate harmony and emotional honesty. She works like a diarist, drawing out her life in soft colors and curlicues, accenting her reality with dream-like textures and crumbling environmental detritus. The orchestral elements tread between the warmth of American folk music and the glacial perfection of classical modernism - rousay is the guiding force, softening rough textures and spinning songs into humming pads and gentle breezes. Donovan's harp is particularly memorable, sitting above Rousay's hissing atmospheres like angels serenading from the clouds.
Finding an ideal home on Shelter Press, nestled among lower register prism pushers such as Felicia Atkinson, Andrew Pekler & Giuseppe Ielasi, claire’s music sprouts probing new forms with a diaristic intimacy that veils its natural, filigree handicraft. What we’re dealing with is effectively a form of beautifully unresolved dream architecture, weaving palpable signals of the everyday, such as voice notes and under-the-table location recordings, with airspun skeins of instrumental fabric that purl the prosaic into pure sound poetry.
As its title implies, claire acknowledges a magick that underlines the lived experience; hers, yours and ours. There’s an imperceptible transience at play that most succinctly nods to and brings Eliane Radigue’s time-lapsed sound images and the laminal rustles of Craig Tattersall into the dematerializing flux of 2022, feeling as though we’re snagged in imagined, liminal space between the clutter of too many open browser tabs and flutter of sounds from an open window. The effect evokes a gentle sensation of detached voyeurism as much as intimacy, and rewards repeated play with an exquisite insight to the marbling of the present moment.