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Clarice Jensen, “The Experience of Repetition as Death” (FatCat, 2020)

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I was legitimately blindsided by Clarice Jensen’s wonderful 2018 debut (For This From That Will Be Filled), but it left me with absolutely no idea what to expect from her in the future, as it was an unusual collection consisting of a collaboration, an ambitious solo composition, and a piece composed by Michael Harrison. As such, it was hard to tell if Jensen was a brilliant cellist with great taste, an extremely promising composer, or both. 

With the spellbinding The Experience of Repetition as Death, Jensen definitively confirms that she is indeed both, as she ingeniously employs loops and effects to craft a beguiling, varied, and richly textured five-song suite inspired by personal tragedy, Freud, and Adrienne Rich. Though death is a definite and deliberate theme, Jensen transforms it into something sublime, transcendent, and achingly beautiful. Moreover, the album’s mesmerizing centerpiece (“Holy Mother”) completely decimates any preexisting conceptions I had regarding what one person can achieve with a cello.

The title of this album is lovingly borrowed from Adrienne Rich’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” as Jensen has a deep admiration for Rich and her work and that particular poem holds deep personal meaning for her. However, it was actually Freud’s writings about the death drive that indirectly led to the unusual conceptual framework of this album, as Jensen was fascinated by his thoughts about the “compulsion to repeat self-destructive behaviors or re-live traumatic events. “Unsurprisingly, that got Jensen thinking a lot about how to break out of the repetitive nature of our existence. Needless to say, it is not hard to see how such thoughts might have immediate practical applications for an artist whose work is largely loop-based by necessity. In essence, Jensen set out to disrupt and transcend familiar patterns in order to subvert a creative death drive (or, at least, a creative stagnation drive). 

The most immediately graspable and overt evidence of Jensen’s clever escape from the prison of repetition lies in the album’s gorgeous bookends: “Daily” and “Final. “In the opening “Daily,” a warmly melodic cello theme languorously unfolds over a bed of drones, gradually blossoming into a more complex crescendo of overlapping loops. It all feels quite seamless and sensuous, yet the theme is actually “fragmented into three different tape loops and never expressed fully in order.” On the closing “Final,” those same loops are revisited in degraded and disrupted form until they are finally allowed to converge into a rapturous finale in which four separate loops unite in achingly lovely harmony.

While both of those pieces are absolutely gorgeous, the three pieces that lie between them offer a more varied array of pleasures. Notably, the first of the trio (“Day Tonight”) is yet another variation on the same loops used in “Daily” and “Final,” albeit an unrecognizably extreme one. According to Jensen, the theme is presented in an “unfamiliar key,” but it also seems like it has been time-stretched until it is essentially a drone piece (it is twice as long as the other two pieces made from the same material). Eventually, however, it builds to a half-fluttering/half-stammering crescendo of sorts that calls to mind classic minimalism a la Steve Reich. 

The following “Metastable” is yet another drone-based piece, but it coheres into a bass-heavy and queasily see-sawing pulse of organ-like chords that were inspired by the omnipresent rhythmic beeping of hospital wards . It is interesting both rhythmically and texturally, but it does not have quite enough of a melodic or harmonic component to leave a deep impression. That is not true of “Holy Mother,” however, which resembles nothing less than a roiling, endlessly shifting, and downright apocalyptic organ mass. While intermittent surges of rumbling low-end admittedly imbue the piece with a seismic intensity, Jensen nevertheless pulls off a nimble balancing act between light and darkness, as the organ-like tones dance and flicker like sunlight through a stained glass window. 

Aside from being a visceral tour de force, “Holy Mother” is quite striking in how dramatically Jensen is able to alter the sound of her cello, as she employs an array of effects to alternately transform her bowed strings into a glimmering nimbus of overtones and a mass chorus of deep voices. She also pulls off a neat trick at the end where the attack disappears to leave only the spectral reverberations (which then disappear as well to leave behind a wake of shivering feedback or overtones).

I suppose the only thing preventing me from declaring that The Experience of Repetition in Death is a start-to-finish masterpiece is the fact that the more experimental pieces (“Day to Night” and “Metastable”) feel like a bit of an extended lull compared to the more melodic and emotionally resonant pieces that come before and after . It seems crazy to lament the fact that the album is not an uninterrupted parade of career-defining triumphs though, as three brilliant pieces out of five is more than enough to make me fall completely in love with this album: the high points are extremely high indeed. 

Unsurprisingly, it was the intensity and bold vision of the epic “Holy Mother” that first grabbed (and held) my attention, but after listening to the album on headphones a few times, I became convinced that “Daily” and “Final” are Jensen’s most towering achievements to date. Both pieces are an absolute master class in both composition and performance, as each is warm, poignant, and beautifully melodic on their face and both make masterful use of looping. With closer listening, however, they reveal themselves to be significantly more than they first appear, as the elegant interplay of the loops and the shimmering accumulation of quivering overtones in their wake reach a level of sublime brilliance that I rarely, if ever, encounter (despite some very diligent searching on my part). With those two pieces, Jensen masks the complex within the simple and makes it all seem effortless and perfectly natural. To my ears, those thirteen minutes alone are more than enough to ensure that The Experience of Repetition in Death will be one of the albums that leaves the deepest and most long-lasting impact on me this year. Clarice Jensen is one seriously formidable artist.

Samples can be found here.

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Ian William Craig, “Red Sun Through Smoke” (FatCat, 2020)

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I am generally not someone who believes that everything happens for a reason or that tragedy breeds great art, but I do think that the emotionally fraught and unusual circumstances surrounding the creation of Red Sun Through Smoke steered Ian William Craig in a direction that feels uncannily appropriate for the current moment. 

Craig’s original plan was simply to sequester himself for a couple weeks in his grandfather’s empty house in Kelowna, British Columbia while he wrote and recorded a new album. As it turned out, however, fate had quite a macabre cavalcade of unpleasant surprises in store for him, as Kelowna became surrounded by forest fires, his grandfather died, his parents moved into the smoke-shrouded house, and the woman he loved moved to Paris. Naturally, all of those events resulted in quite an intense swirl of emotions, but at least a correspondingly intense (and beautiful) album ultimately emerged from that fraught period, as the best moments of Red Sun Through Smoke distill Craig’s art to its simplest, most direct, and most intimate form.

When I listened to this album for the first time, one of the thoughts that immediately struck me was how much Craig’s creative trajectory uncannily mirrors that of Grouper’s Liz Harris: both artists initially established themselves by carving out a distinctive style, then set about slowly dissolving that stylistic veil to reduce their palette to little more than a voice and a piano. As someone who loves what Craig can do with his arsenal of wobbly, hissing tape players, I cannot say that I unambiguously prefer this more naked approach to songcraft, but I certainly admire and appreciate his desire to make his art more honest and distilled.

That said, Craig’s transformation is still a work in progress, so Red Sun Through Smoke strikes an effective balance between his experimental/abstract side and his more songcraft-driven side. Both sides yield some wonderful results, but it is definitely the unadorned and heartfelt piano ballads like “Weight” and “Stories” that feel like the album’s true soul and raison d’etre.

Admittedly, I have not historically been thrilled when an experimentally minded musician that I love decides to sit down at a piano to try their hand at nakedly intimate balladry, as people tend to fall into extremely familiar patterns with that instrument. Much like harps and harmoniums, it is deceptively easy to make a piano sound good, but extremely difficult to find and establish a distinctive voice. 

To his credit, Craig solved that problem beautifully in “Weight” by playing in an organically loose and fluid way that is shaped by the central vocal melody. There is a chord progression, but Craig seems far more interested in the way the notes linger and dissolve in the wake of his vocal phrases than he does in creating a structured foundation to sing over. Also, the rhythm feels far more dependent upon Craig’s own breathing patterns than it does with any unchanging time-signature.

As far as I am concerned, “Weight” stands as both the album’s achingly beautiful centerpiece and the culmination of Craig’s evolution as a composer, as it seamlessly merges tender, lilting melodies with hiss-ravaged harmonies in near-rapturous fashion. The following “Comma” is similarly lovely though, as Craig’s voice nimbly swoops and slides around in the higher registers in a way that would make a soul/R&B diva proud. Also, the underlying music captures Craig at his most inventively minimalist and texturally effective, as frayed swells of harmonized vocals provide an unconventionally ghostly and warbling backdrop.

Craig later repeats that delightful trick once more with “Take,” but the remainder of the album is generally an impressively varied suite of songs and vignettes that take his hyper-constrained palette in some very interesting and divergent directions. Granted, some of those directions work much better than others, as I cannot say that I would miss the a capella opener “Random” or the piano instrumental “Mountains Astray,” but the hit-to-miss ratio is nevertheless quite an impressive one overall.

I am especially fond of two of the more tape loop-based pieces, particularly the scratchy, disjointed, and rippling arpeggio layers of “The Smokefallen.” The darker and more spidery “Last of the Lantern Oil” is quite haunting as well, as fragments of Craig’s vocals warble and flutter in a haze of decaying, distorted, and deconstructed minor key piano chords.

Notably, “Last of the Lantern Oil” features some noises from a shortwave radio that Craig remembers fondly from his late grandfather’s days as a ham radio enthusiast. Those sounds are not a terribly crucial part of the piece, but their impact on Craig’s art cannot be overstated, as he has observed that “all of the sounds inherent to that process, from the crackling static to the disembodied voices breaking up to the glissando of the frequency dial searching for connection, have directly informed what it is that I do.” 

Craig’s grandfather also deserves some credit for his decision to partially move away from that aesthetic, however, as Craig notes that his own interest in “themes of decay and forgetting” began to feel false as his grandfather increasingly deteriorated from dementia. I get that, but I personally hope that he continues dabbling with his decaying loops forever anyway, as that is what made me first fall in love with his work. I can certainly embrace Red Sun Through Smoke‘s more poignant balance of openness and emotional depth to abstraction and experimentation for now though. 

Moreover, I suspect that gradual transformation was not easy for Craig (given his reluctance to even sing on his early albums), but that unflinching and fearless examination of what he wants to say and how he needs to say it is precisely why he has blossomed into one of the most gifted artists of his generation. 
I would not necessarily call this album raw, as Craig was very exacting in shaping how these pieces sound, but there has been a significant decrease in the amount of artistic distance that he allows to creep into his work. In fact, Red Sun Through Smoke is quite literally a diaristic album (the lyrics were culled directly from Craig’s journal) and it is all the better for it. While I could probably make a strong case that some of Craig’s other albums have more great songs, none of them have left a deeper mark, taken more chances, or made a stronger statement than this one.

Samples can be found here.

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Ian William Craig, “Centres” (FatCat/130701, 2016)

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It has taken me an embarrassingly long time to finally acknowledge the sublime brilliance of Vancouver-based polymath Ian William Craig, but he certainly has not made it easy, as every album that I have heard from him seems to showcase a new facet of his elusive aesthetic (classical pianist, distressed tape experimenter, instrument builder, the next Tim Hecker, hallucinatory hymnal composer, etc.). Also, much of his best work was quietly released in limited vinyl editions on Sean McCann’s Recital Program imprint (and the stellar Heretic Surface does not even appear in Discogs), so it was easy to miss. 

With his latest release, however, Craig seems poised to breakthrough to a larger audience. At the very least, Centres is certainly a creative breakthrough, expertly weaving together several different experimental and esoteric threads into an excellent batch of actual songs with hooks. If it is possible to make a largely guitar-free classic shoegaze album, Craig has done it with Centres.

The opening “Contain (Astoria Version)” is surprisingly radical statement of intent, as it not only places Craig’s strong, classically trained vocals front and center, but it goes one step further and runs them through Autotune. It is quite an unusual effect, as it sounds like a very sincere and melodic half-sung poem or a post-modern opera refrain filtered through contemporary pop music. Or maybe like David Sylvian teamed up with Rihanna’s producers to try to break through to the teen market, but then ran out of money before anyone got around to adding beats. 

That is only half the story though, as the surrounding music is a fuzzed-out ocean of hissing bliss, lush grandeur, and loops of angelic female vocals. Somehow it manages to be simultaneously razor-focused and unrepentantly indulgent at the same time, as Craig never loses sight of the strong melodic hooks, yet perversely allows his perfectly sculpted avant-pop gem to dissolve, smear, and stretch into a ten-minute epic. It is an audacious monster of a piece that sounds like nothing else that anyone else is doing. It is also a fully formed synthesis of several stylistic strains that have run throughout Craig’s career, somehow blending his quasi-operatic talents with blown-out Hecker-esque drone and wobbly, hissing tape manipulations without pushing any of them into the background.

To his credit, Craig does not attempt to replicate any similar feats elsewhere on the album, instead seeming restlessly hellbent on moving constantly forward into new vistas. For example, the following “A Single Hope” is a left-field shoegaze masterpiece, as Craig’s elegantly melodic vocals drift over a glacially slow bed of distorted chord swells to basically produce high-grade heroin for the ears. “Drifting to Void on All Sides” follows in a similarly gorgeous and narcotic vein, unfolding as a wobbly chorus of angelic voices floating from a battery of malfunctioning tape machines. 

The comparatively clean and accordion-based “The Nearness,” on the other hand, sounds like fairly straightforward “pop classical,” which makes sense given that Centres is a rare dispatch from FatCat’s classically bent 130701 imprint. Despite its initial form, however, “The Nearness” still ultimately dissolves into crackling and hissing tape-ravaged heaven. The recurring theme throughout the album time and time again is that of strikingly beautiful and serene melodies blearily drifting through a roiling maelstrom of hissing, stuttering, crackling, and quivering distortion and decay. 

On the most immediately gratifying and memorable pieces, the structured melodies manage to heroically assert their dominance, but the pieces (such as “Set to Lapse”) that just wallow in this bliss-storm are quite pleasurable in their own right. In fact, an album of murkily hallucinatory and masterfully textured drone in the vein of “A Circle Without Having To Curve” would probably still be a lock for one of my favorite records of the year.

I suspect that Centres probably could have been condensed from a double-album to just a single LP if the more incidental/interlude-type pieces had been scrapped, but their presence feels crucial in maintaining the sustained and soft-focus altered reality of Centre‘s spell. Also, the recurrent sea of artfully blurred abstraction seems necessary to ensure that each island of fully formed song makes a maximum impact. Seven or eight great songs in a row would be wonderful, but probably also a little numbing: I definitely appreciate the surprise of a simple and pure masterwork like the quasi-hymnal “Purpose (Is No Country)” blossoming forth from the static quite deep into the album. 

Appropriately, Craig saves one last treat for the final piece, reprising the oceanic and fuzzy heaven of the opening “Contain” with just his voice and an acoustic guitar. Naturally, it is wonderfully tender and beautiful, which illustrates exactly why this album is such an absolute goddamn masterpiece: most of these songs were already quite good before Craig unleashed his distressed-tape sorcery and arrangement skills upon them. And as far as texturally and harmonically rich sound art goes, it is amply clear that Craig can hang with just about anyone else around. As far as I am concerned, Ian William Craig is creative supernova at this point in his career. Centres is easily one of the few albums of 2016 that I can safely declare to be an instant classic without feeling dangerously close to hyperbole.

Listen here.