Claire Rousay's a little death is a perfect example. Listen to it in a rush or when your mind is occupied with other material (so, half-listen), and the album's elusive sound collages can fade into a pleasant insignificance: clearly skilfully crafted, but hard to get a decent hold of. Give it more undivided attention, and a compelling sense of murky, unsettled and brooding depths gradually emerges.
Pitched as a return to the Canadian, currently Los Angeles–based artist's core practice after the more pop-orientated explorations of Sentiments (2024), A Little Death is rooted in found sounds and field recordings, this time captured specifically at dusk (it's surprising the plentiful chirping cicadas that crop up here don't get a shoutout in the album credits). Here, however, the field recordings essentially act as the canvas on which other instrumentation (acoustic and electric guitar, piano, clarinet, electronics, viola) by Rousay and a cast of collaborators (including M. Sage and Austin, Texas based violinist Mari Maurice aka More Eaze, whose excellent recent album No Floor Rousay contributed to) is added to create multilayered sound collages that hover over the often elusive dividing lines between ambient, experimental minimalist composition and musique concrete.
Fittingly for an album inspired by the gradual dimming of the surroundings as the day drifts from light to darkness, a twilit murk hovers over the proceedings. There are unpredictable shifts in mood here. The (relatively speaking) jaunty vignette of "One Night" could almost pass for the kind of cross-section of 'American primitive' guitar arts and electronic interference that William Tyler perfected on this year's Time Indefinite, whilst “Conditional Love” is pure aural unease, a few minutes of unsettling scratching and clanging from the furthest-away corner of some half-forgotten basement, a companion piece to the traumatised voiceover recounting a scary experience of being trapped in perpetual gloom (real or figurative) on the intro "I Couldn't Find The Light".
It's clear that these compositions are infused by strong emotions and the inescapable weight of memories, but it's not always easy to interpret the hidden meaning. Tracks like the weightlessly floating "Doubt" (hints of William Basinski's work with disintegrating sound sources, maybe) pulsate with a blurry-edged beauty but often seem on the verge of disintegrating before they bloom into full focus.
Even so, the overriding sense of elusiveness doesn't matter much when A Little Death hits its considerable heights. For example, the concluding eight-minute title track shakes off its humbly lowkey foundations to become a soaring, even humbly anthemic duet for piano and viola, a ray of undisguisedly open and inviting emoting on an album that isn't otherwise shy to make the listener work that extra bit harder to access its offerings.
