Experiencing Canadian experimentalist Claire Rousay’s latest album a little death is something like watching Nicolas Flamel transmute lead into gold—every ordinary sound she touches feels alchemical. Known for recording “whole days, every day” on a Zoom H5, rousay transforms field recordings, ambient chatter, and the thuds and chimes of unidentifiable objects into long-form musique concrète that feels at once intimate and vast. Over the past five years, she’s become adept at conjuring raw, tender emotion from the sparsest materials, recreating life’s subtleties as though by magic.
a little death, the final entry in a trilogy that began with a heavenly touch and a softer focus, sees rousay dialling back her usual relentless excavation in favour of a more deliberate exploration of the dark unknown. Built primarily from recordings captured at dusk, these compositions operate like whispered conversations with her collaborators, subtly integrating samples from close associates like more ease and M. Sage. Granular drones hum beneath live instrumentation and the restless vibrations of night-time crickets, providing a constant undercurrent that grounds the work in tangible space. Years in the making, the album feels more polished, more intentional—a move from scrappy collagist to capital-C Composer.
Even as rousay sheds the singer-songwriter scaffolding of last year’s sentiment, her strengths as a vocalist and instrumentalist remain. “night one” rides a rough, buoyant emo guitar riff threaded with nostalgia, while her Auto-Tuned croons convey fed-up desperation with delicate poise. On “somewhat burdensome,” her guitar meanders precariously, each note stretching toward the next like a tightrope walker balancing over silence. It’s a study in tone and space, a minimalist’s meditation on tension, urgency, and restraint.
Earlier works like t4t thrived on asymmetry, letting whispers, breaths, and erratic percussive hits dissolve into mystery; a heavenly touch emphasized contrast in fidelity to demarcate sonic space. On a little death, rousay allows sounds to blur, melt, and fuse. In “doubt,” static and drone swell together, while buried voices become indistinguishable from rain, field recordings, or oscillating electronic textures. “conditional love” blends Andrew Weathers’ lap steel with a high-pitched drone until the two instruments feel less separate than the reverberations of electricity itself. Here, rousay’s mixing is precise, her textures meticulous, signalling a new compositional ambition.
The album’s theatricality peaks on the title track. Gretchen Korsmo’s breathy clarinet unfurls over more eaze’s long violin strokes and rustling leaves, eventually collapsing into a low, undulating buzz that swallows everything in its path. By the final moments, only a single drone and the chirping of nocturnal insects remain, leaving the listener suspended between human touch and natural world. With a little death, rousay doesn’t just capture sound—she conducts it, bending both machines and environment with an almost mystical authority.
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