The LA-based Canadian sound artist and composer claire rousay began her musical career as a drummer in a string of math-rock and emo bands, before a left-turn into dreamier and more ambient territory toward the back end of the 2010s culminated in critically acclaimed albums like a softer focus (2021) and last year’s career highlight sentiment. Her practice revolves around experimental techniques: found sounds, field recordings and all manner of plunderphonic wonkiness is combined with a natural grasp of mood and melody to create pieces that are rooted in the avant-garde but are never inaccessible. She can be haunting (see 2024’s The Bloody Lady, a reimagined score for Viktor Kubal’s animated film about Elizabeth Bathory) or soothing, her soundscapes draped in melancholic romanticism or reflecting the uncanny minimalism of the city at night.
Nighttime – or more specifically dusk – is the underlying theme of a little death. Recording as day turned into night, rousay utilised the ambient sounds from her own life and structured them into eight linked tracks that marry up musique concrete with an almost neoclassical compositional nous. Voice is often an important tool for rousay, to the extent that narratives, however non-linear, seem to emerge more frequently in her music than in that of many ostensibly similar artists. The voice also serves to pull focus to the human aspect of the music, and this is the case on the first track here, i couldn’t find the light. In less than a minute, she sets out her stall: themes of puzzlement, abandonment, spirituality and the closeness of death become instantly apparent. The glitchy background noise leads into conditional love, where Alex Cunningham’s sweeping violin and Andrew Weathers’ lap steel hold their heads high over rousay’s jittery backing.
She is joined on just by M. Sage, who provides clarinet, electronics and an elegant piano: the whole thing has the air of deconstructed chamber music made for a haunted house. On somehow she moves freely from clatter to calm, the nuances of her electroacoustic recording processes audible in every precisely placed note, before another spoken segment comments on the difficulty of making it in the music business, crystallising the discomfort that pervades the album in more abstract ways elsewhere. On somewhat burdensome, a delicate and often gorgeous palette of guitar notes rains down over a muted, minimalist piano. It’s as if the album gets more emotionally candid as it progresses, with the closing title track growing over from a creaking sound collage into a gently stirring meditation reflecting the structural habits of post-rock, with swathes of viola enfolding a slow-building piano melody.
Always willing to spring a few surprises, rousay breaks breaks up the flow of things halfway through the record with night one, a serene and beautiful piece of folksy American primitive guitar, before plunging us into one of the album’s most unsettling moments with doubt, which sounds simultaneously transcendent and troubled, the cars passing in the background seeming like they exist in another world beyond a kind of veil. Here and elsewhere, rousay creates something that is akin to ambient music, but unlike the majority of what falls under that banner, her music is made for a more engaged kind of listening. There is always something going on around the edges, a constant tension between comfort and disquiet. Tranquil as it may sometimes appear, this is nonetheless music for troubled times.
a little death (October 31st, 2025) Thrill Jockey
Bandcamp: https://clairerousay.bandcamp.com/album/a-little-death