Composer, musician, and experimental sound designer claire rousay has been mighty prolific in the last few years, releasing a handful of acclaimed solo albums, as well as collaborations with William Tyler, more eaze and, just a couple of weeks ago, Martyna Basta. Now she has added yet another string to her bow with the creation of her own record label, quality sounds ltd. Her latest release, on holding, is the first on her new label and sits somewhere between EP and album, in terms of length (are mini-albums still a thing? Even if they are, this one feels too complete and too engulfing to deserve the sobriquet ‘mini’).
The hallmarks of rousay’s near-ambient sound are all here. The dusty piano chords and fleeting sparks of electronic background noise in holy sedative combine to make the piece feel like a kind of future relic. The field recordings sound like happy accidents, and the piece sits somewhere between musique concrete and a kind of domestic hauntology, aware of its nostalgic potential without ever pandering to the tropes of nostalgia.
The first piece is the meandering new escape. Beginning with an improvised piano melody, wistful and slow, it wanders through twelve-plus minutes of gentle glitches, interrupted electronic reveries, beeps, blips, bell-like percussion and truncated drones. There are ASMR-like textural elements. The mood is free and quietly exploratory. The phrase that springs to mind is ‘hushed noise’, which sounds like an oxymoron but isn’t: rousay uses dissonance not to be brash or overtly challenging, but as a way of interpreting daily life in the abstract. Unlike a lot of experimental music, it is totally approachable. Though the melodies are often unusual and sometimes intangible, the mood they provoke is one of familiarity and closeness.
While the piano/electronics/field recordings combo is prevalent here, there is also room for a wider array of instrumentation. On rekindle (for guitar) rousay whips up some Lynch/Badalamenti vibes and, in doing so, creates the album’s most heavily textured moment. The short final piece, ogden home, goes in the other direction, eschewing all melodic structure in favour of a single insect-like sound, somewhere between hiss and hum.
The title track, which hovers at the centre of the release, is awash with pulsing swathes of foggy noise that envelop the lingering piano notes and scratchy electronics. Indistinct voices converse in the background, becoming clearer at the halfway point, which is when you realise that the whole thing might be an act of recording the recording process, a comment on how the manner of creation is inseparable from the thing created. We know from rousay’s previous work that she is an impeccable sound designer, and that every note she commits to tape is there for a purpose. Here, that purpose at times feels self-reflexive (though not in an academic or forced way), and it allows us a valuable glimpse of a process that is highly original and always sonically rewarding.
on holding (October 9th, 2026) quality sounds ltd