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CD
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THRILL 610CD
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"sentiment is a meditation of the poignant emotional terrains of loneliness, nostalgia, sentimentality, guilt, and sex. The album's narrative arc is guided by delicate musical gestures and artistic vulnerability, audaciously synthesizing disparate and unexpected influences. Claire Rousay is a singular artist, known for challenging conventions in experimental and ambient music forms. Rousay masterfully incorporates textural found sounds, sumptuous drones and candid field recordings into music that celebrates the beauty in life's banalities. Her music is curatorial and granular in detail, deftly shaped into emotionally affecting pieces. Rousay's vocals and guitar take center stage on sentiment. Her intimate, diaristic lyrics contrast with her mechanical-inflected vocal effects, emphasizing a powerful desire for connection, a deep yearning and a lingering sense of separation. The spare guitar playing and laconic tempo both drive the songs and exude a sense of resignation. Her delicate mastery of nuance draws on her explorative musical past that she, with sincerity and admiration, seamlessly interweaves into her adventurous textures and distinctive compositions. 'I want to belong to the worlds and communities I look up to. Same as someone using a Fender guitar or dressing like Kurt Cobain. Emulate your heroes,' says Rousay. The album balances the poetic soul of her influences with a documentarian heart, Rousay capturing moments of her life while living alone in houses across the country, learning to play guitar, and reconnecting with pop music. Her innate ability to conjure pure feeling from sound derives from her delightful embrace of pop forms, the vulnerability found in field recordings, minimalistic arrangements and innovative sound choices. sentiment is blissfully, achingly melancholic, and an undeniably sensual listening experience."
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LP
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THRILL 610LP
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LP version. "sentiment is a meditation of the poignant emotional terrains of loneliness, nostalgia, sentimentality, guilt, and sex. The album's narrative arc is guided by delicate musical gestures and artistic vulnerability, audaciously synthesizing disparate and unexpected influences. Claire Rousay is a singular artist, known for challenging conventions in experimental and ambient music forms. Rousay masterfully incorporates textural found sounds, sumptuous drones and candid field recordings into music that celebrates the beauty in life's banalities. Her music is curatorial and granular in detail, deftly shaped into emotionally affecting pieces. Rousay's vocals and guitar take center stage on sentiment. Her intimate, diaristic lyrics contrast with her mechanical-inflected vocal effects, emphasizing a powerful desire for connection, a deep yearning and a lingering sense of separation. The spare guitar playing and laconic tempo both drive the songs and exude a sense of resignation. Her delicate mastery of nuance draws on her explorative musical past that she, with sincerity and admiration, seamlessly interweaves into her adventurous textures and distinctive compositions. 'I want to belong to the worlds and communities I look up to. Same as someone using a Fender guitar or dressing like Kurt Cobain. Emulate your heroes,' says Rousay. The album balances the poetic soul of her influences with a documentarian heart, Rousay capturing moments of her life while living alone in houses across the country, learning to play guitar, and reconnecting with pop music. Her innate ability to conjure pure feeling from sound derives from her delightful embrace of pop forms, the vulnerability found in field recordings, minimalistic arrangements and innovative sound choices. sentiment is blissfully, achingly melancholic, and an undeniably sensual listening experience."
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LP
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THRILL 610X-LP
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LP version. Yellow color vinyl. "sentiment is a meditation of the poignant emotional terrains of loneliness, nostalgia, sentimentality, guilt, and sex. The album's narrative arc is guided by delicate musical gestures and artistic vulnerability, audaciously synthesizing disparate and unexpected influences. Claire Rousay is a singular artist, known for challenging conventions in experimental and ambient music forms. Rousay masterfully incorporates textural found sounds, sumptuous drones and candid field recordings into music that celebrates the beauty in life's banalities. Her music is curatorial and granular in detail, deftly shaped into emotionally affecting pieces. Rousay's vocals and guitar take center stage on sentiment. Her intimate, diaristic lyrics contrast with her mechanical-inflected vocal effects, emphasizing a powerful desire for connection, a deep yearning and a lingering sense of separation. The spare guitar playing and laconic tempo both drive the songs and exude a sense of resignation. Her delicate mastery of nuance draws on her explorative musical past that she, with sincerity and admiration, seamlessly interweaves into her adventurous textures and distinctive compositions. 'I want to belong to the worlds and communities I look up to. Same as someone using a Fender guitar or dressing like Kurt Cobain. Emulate your heroes,' says Rousay. The album balances the poetic soul of her influences with a documentarian heart, Rousay capturing moments of her life while living alone in houses across the country, learning to play guitar, and reconnecting with pop music. Her innate ability to conjure pure feeling from sound derives from her delightful embrace of pop forms, the vulnerability found in field recordings, minimalistic arrangements and innovative sound choices. sentiment is blissfully, achingly melancholic, and an undeniably sensual listening experience."
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CD
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SHELTER 134CD
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When words trail off at the beginning of claire rousay's Everything Perfect Is Already Here, ornate instrumentation is waiting to fill a void left by the breakdown of language. Yet it becomes clear as you trace rousay's collaged sonic pathway that breakdown, of meaning and also of melody, is also a place to rest. Everything Perfect... is made up of two extended compositions that cycle between familiarity and unknowing. There are seemingly infinite ways to feel in response to these pieces of music, which shift tone across their languid duration, earnest like a familiar song but unbound from the emotional didacticisms of lyrical voice and pop form. rousay builds a fluid landscape around the acoustic contributions of Alex Cunningham (violin), Mari Maurice (electronics, violin), Marilu Donovan (harp), and Theodore Cale Schafer (piano), whose respective melodies weave gently in and out, sometimes steady, sometimes aching, sometimes receding altogether in deference to less overtly musical sounds. That is, percussive texture in the form of unvarnished samples and field recordings: the rattle and rustle and the stops and starts of life unfurling, voices sharing memories nearly out of reach, doors closing, wind against a microphone. Everything comes from somewhere in particular, possessing the veneer of the diaristic, but sound's provenance is secondary here and so these details become tangled and fused. Such details sound not as individual ornaments or stories but the collective architecture of the greater composition. It's an architecture that is not quite formed and thus full of openings out to the world unfolding. "The world unfolding," that's a kind way of saying change, movement, loss, transformation. Things rousay here indexes, not without shards of desire or pain, still somehow what I hear is coarse peace in the in-between. Everything Is Perfect Is Already Here is loose and beautiful in surprising ways. The music guides a certain experience of the world around. In claire's music there is this marriage -- not just a pairing or juxtaposition but an interrelationship, an eventual confusion -- of song/texture, narrative/abstraction, figure/ground. Everything comes from somewhere in particular but not just the voices, the field recordings, the what is being said or meant, what matters is "the where you are now". There are so many ways of anchoring oneself in the present, some have to do with fantasy or storytelling and some with accepting what is. These two compositions find peace between these modes. They sweep you away and then bring you to earth, but which is which, anyway? Their mode of feeling is inquisitive.
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LP
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SHELTER 134LP
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2023 repress. When words trail off at the beginning of claire rousay's Everything Perfect Is Already Here, ornate instrumentation is waiting to fill a void left by the breakdown of language. Yet it becomes clear as you trace rousay's collaged sonic pathway that breakdown, of meaning and also of melody, is also a place to rest. Everything Perfect... is made up of two extended compositions that cycle between familiarity and unknowing. There are seemingly infinite ways to feel in response to these pieces of music, which shift tone across their languid duration, earnest like a familiar song but unbound from the emotional didacticisms of lyrical voice and pop form. rousay builds a fluid landscape around the acoustic contributions of Alex Cunningham (violin), Mari Maurice (electronics, violin), Marilu Donovan (harp), and Theodore Cale Schafer (piano), whose respective melodies weave gently in and out, sometimes steady, sometimes aching, sometimes receding altogether in deference to less overtly musical sounds. That is, percussive texture in the form of unvarnished samples and field recordings: the rattle and rustle and the stops and starts of life unfurling, voices sharing memories nearly out of reach, doors closing, wind against a microphone. Everything comes from somewhere in particular, possessing the veneer of the diaristic, but sound's provenance is secondary here and so these details become tangled and fused. Such details sound not as individual ornaments or stories but the collective architecture of the greater composition. It's an architecture that is not quite formed and thus full of openings out to the world unfolding. "The world unfolding," that's a kind way of saying change, movement, loss, transformation. Things rousay here indexes, not without shards of desire or pain, still somehow what I hear is coarse peace in the in-between. Everything Is Perfect Is Already Here is loose and beautiful in surprising ways. The music guides a certain experience of the world around. In claire's music there is this marriage -- not just a pairing or juxtaposition but an interrelationship, an eventual confusion -- of song/texture, narrative/abstraction, figure/ground. Everything comes from somewhere in particular but not just the voices, the field recordings, the what is being said or meant, what matters is "the where you are now". There are so many ways of anchoring oneself in the present, some have to do with fantasy or storytelling and some with accepting what is. These two compositions find peace between these modes. They sweep you away and then bring you to earth, but which is which, anyway? Their mode of feeling is inquisitive.
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LP
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SE 009LP
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Second Editions presents Both by claire rousay. claire rousay has been exploring the sensitivities of sound always in relation to "the self" and "the other", equally. Her work is always seen as a contribution, as engagement. Recording, collaging, and composing become acts of considering, remembering, giving. Therefore, music becomes a context, or more precisely, a habitat. But what does it say about this music when the artistic choice goes deeper, when it is not only an urge to express but to find oneself? When there is more to communicate, to connect to than a "musical work"? This new record features two attuned location-based Hörstücke that sit somewhere between conceptual composition and magical realism. "Library" is a site-specific piece recorded at, and played back to the halls of the Central Library in San Antonio, Texas. A meticulous recording of social against functional space. Mixing a live microphone feed through a pair of loudspeakers and accompanying it with two sine tones pitched specifically to the building's dimensions and resonant frequencies, rousay is blending architectural space and human interaction into one curated arrangement. On the opposite side, "Two Things" acts as a transient dream sequence, an elusive mise-en-scène. It provides a sense of location so familiar yet very disorienting. A (re)introduction to a periphery state, a fictional truth, an outside world constructed entirely and deliberately from the inside of an apartment. Composed and produced by claire rousay at Central Library San Antonio in Texas, 2019, and in Ciudad de México, 2019. Mastered and cut by Anne Taegert at Duplates & Mastering in Berlin, 2020. Includes download code; edition of 300.
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