The San Antonio musician’s longform ambient compositions honor the timeworn strategy of soundtracking imaginary films, but their cinematic expanses have the raw immediacy of status updates.
There’s something in the air each time new work by San Antonio-based composer claire rousay arrives, something like “the feeling of the idea of silk scarves in the air” in Robert Ashley’s uncanny opera Private Parts: thoughtful, self-referential, beautiful, supplemental. Lately, it happens all the time, as her Bandcamp offers dozens of releases from just the past few years. She tries on various styles, including in-joke odes to mall punk and hyperpop, but the best of them show off her extraordinary ability to coax, and craft, multitudes from minute gestures. Her sounds—which might resemble scratches on a drumhead, soft plunks of piano, room-tone-tinged murmurs in a room different from the one you are in now, or the flick of a lighter—are straight out of experimental music’s central casting. Yet they come together in what feel like unique sample packs. Her arrangements, which tend toward the side-long, honor the old ambient strategy of serving as soundtracks for imaginary films, but their cinematic expanses have the immediacy of status updates.
rousay calls her latest everything perfect is already here, and what’s here, along with her usual ear-ticklers, are some offerings from collaborators that hint at composition. A voice begins: Um, um, I think, uh um, my um…, the words stumbling like the symphony Le Tigre made of women swallowing their own tongues, and also like a conductor tapping her baton. There are strings: Allies Alex Cunningham and Mari Maurice open their violins while Theodore Cale Schafer tickles the ivories. Deep in the mix, someone mentions “sadness and melancholy” as the performers buttress rousay’s itchy percussion with scraps of melody. Marilu Donovan plucks a harp. The mood is a cat lazing in a sunbeam, or the revelation that surviving trauma is a matter of staying present. About eight minutes in, big puffs of new age-y chords hover above something ticking. Calm comes in time.
The title track falls deeper into the kind of spell that a few people can cast in concert. rousay and company embark on a drone with facets that gradually reveal themselves. Here comes a bow against steel, then the depth of a machine humming to itself. Still, though, rustles and color from someone else fill the corners of the mix, as if whatever is happening among the players isn’t it. There’s always something or someone left outside. A bit of digital-ish noise pops by, striking in its beauty. The pleasure of the glitch. It’s generous, and accompanied by a rustling and cracking that, to me, sounded like notebook paper crumpling into balls for the trashcan, sort of funny. Then everything drops out and there’s just a recorder capturing an empty room. The void is deafening. Someone says, faintly, “I will always fight for and laugh with and care for and have them care for you. It’s really reassuring and lovely to have that person.” There’s a temper tantrum of banging on things, wind on a mic head. Someone laughs and says, but this can’t be right, “Whitney Houston.” Drones and wheezy rattling return.
Perhaps what sets rousay apart from the hundreds of field-recordings-and-drone workers out there is the mystery of her organization. Her tracks might be improvised or labored upon. They feel both sui generis and tossed off. You can hear her hand, and it makes you wonder, and in that way her recordings are empathy machines. They warm and flatter as they fill the air around you, silk scarves just out of reach.
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