Taken from her new album “A Small Unknowable Thing” out this Friday (13 August), Josienne Clarke has today shared her new single and video “The Collector”, a song inspired by the writer John Fowles. Fowles’ novel ‘The Collector’, published in 1963, follows a “psychotic young man who kidnaps a female art student in London and holds her captive in the cellar of his rural farmhouse”.
In his review of the album, Danny Neill says of “The Collector”:
“That discord is especially upfront on ‘The Collector’, opening as it does with more sheets of distortion, a white lightning introduction well-judged as the church-bell organ and waves of cymbals that follow play like skies clearing after a storm over a mournful landscape.”
“You’re the collector / You’ll keep me forever / A small unknowable thing / With you as preceptor,” Clarke sings on ‘The Collector’, a song inspired by writer John Fowles.
She tells us: “[The protagonist] doesn’t see her as a human being. She has all this power and then none at all, because her’s was a power she’s unable to use for anything; the man’s was always greater. It’s a power that makes you really very vulnerable.”
Clarke experimented with unusual sounds on the track, marrying earthy folk with cutting industrial noise. Recording the sound of her phone interface via her Cornell amp, Clarke processed it using some Logic pre-sets to make a sound that eventually resembled an angle-grinder. Its heavy noise grates and cuts, reflecting the horror of the woman’s treatment.
Clarke’s second solo album, A Small Unknowable Thing, will be released on August 13th via her own label, Corduroy Punk Records.
Pre-order: https://ffm.to/unknowable
Photo Credit: Video and Artwork: Alec Bowman Clarke