WITH HER acclaimed album a softer focus only just in the rear-view mirror, San Antonio sound experimentalist claire rousay has announced a new imprint, Mended Dreams, in partnership with American Dreams Records; which she intends as an outlet for highly limited editions of both solo and collaborative work that will be available ony by subscription or through the parent label direct.
And it’s fair to say she has struck while the hammer is hot, so to speak, with this Friday just gone, May 7th, seeing the new imprint release a trio of works – and a tote bag designed by Renata Rojo, all of which you can find over at Mended Dreams’ Bandcamp page.
The first of the releases is a collection, which it won’t surprise you to learn is just that: a 2xCD compilation comprising of 13 tracks, providing routes into her oeuvre before a softer focus, beginning with early solo percussive work on the first disc and move into musique concrète and beyond on the second.
Personally selected, the anthology clocks in at around two and a quarter hours.
Second up is a limited (200 only), four-track cassette, the blurry intimacy of the Twin Bed EP; the first new solo work since a softer focus. It threads together vocals, field recordings, piano and synthesisers, more; and we’ve embedded the 11-minute title track below. Herein claire’s piano skills are the beating heart, unspooling over field recordings of life being lived, demotically; slow guitar rings and warms as the track opens out, graduating, finally allowing vocal colour. The effect is twin-bed confidential.
And far from least, there’s a collaborative cassette, released in the same small batch, with LA experimental composer and jazz musician Patrick Shiroishi, entitled Now Am Found; a work put together over a month after many years of acknowledging a mutual wish to collaborate.
claire delineates the aesthetic of this five-track work as “music playing in the other room,”; environmental sounds, field recordings and languorous jazz records, synths and vocals all come with a sense of spatial remove; overheard, as if in a part-slumber.
a collection, Now Am Found and Twin Bed are all available now.
Connect with claire at her website and on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
No Comment