In a 2021interview, experimental composer Claire Rousay went some distance in explaining the aloof gauze that so much of her music seems to be enveloped by. “I guess I primarily identify as a broken person, a struggling person, a fuck up, a letdown. Sometimes I feel like the whole world is out to get me. Sometimes I feel like the whole world is bowing at my feet,” she admitted.
Her music and even some of her album covers connect to her self-reflection. A quick scroll through her Bandcamp page shows cover art where she’s still in bed, sometimes appearing unable to rise. Elsewhere, there are photos akin to the bare Polaroid snapshots Jandek has employed, showing a foot on a toilet, a boom box on a table, flowers in a vase, or a lawnmower.
The music accompanying these visuals is often based on drones, recorded conversations, and field recordings of the kinds of seemingly accidental ambience other artists might edit out of the finished tracks. Even when she approaches something at least related to pop music, as she did on 2024’s Sentiment, her voice is cloaked in Auto-Tune as song structure rises and falls into and out of hazy dronescapes or snippets of recorded conversation.
One could then argue that A Little Death is a return to form(lessness). Opener “I Couldn’t Find the Light” includes a recording of what sounds like someone retelling a brief brush with death, as jittery squelches of computer noise dart back and forth, like someone fumbling in the dark for a light switch. In less than a minute, it is interrupted by the following track, “Conditional Love”, which rebuilds out of the darkness as sonic phantoms of eerie hums stack on top of one another, while lo-fi field recordings murmur underneath.
None of this music is without precedent; C Schultz and Hajsch’s self-titled 2000 release on Sonig comes to mind. Yet, this music has an intended darkness, primarily since it revolves around recordings made at dusk. Yet, her “dusk” is as metaphoric as it is literal. “Somehow”, for example, adds a recorded voice relaying a story about failing to receive a granted request of free entry to a concert as a last hope during a stint of homelessness and poverty.
“Somewhat Burdensome” sputters to a beginning, with some tentative acoustic guitar strums and someone coughing in the background, before finding its intended space, where an electric guitar finds peace with a distant piano and an ever-growing encroachment of gentle feedback.
Claire Rousay creates music that constantly shape shifts, though those alterations are subtle, connecting to a natural inability for anything to remain static. In this way, she tells stories, converts creeping decay into arcs and climaxes. A clarinet or violin, used on the LP’s title track, for example, ebb and flow like tones from a harmonium, as sounds of what could be someone washing car tires are barely noticeable in the background. The mystery of all this sound is ever present in its beauty, as Rousay demonstrates through a fog of enveloping drones, how disquieting a relief the night can be.