a little death

Witnessing 14th-century French alchemist Nicolas Flamel turn base metals into gold must have been what it’s like to experience Canadian-born experimentalist claire rousay conjuring entire worlds from found sounds and field recordings. rousay, who has said she records her “whole day every day” on a Zoom H5 recorder, knows how to get a lot of bang for her buck: weaving the chimes and thuds of unidentified objects into longform musique concrete compositions; casually dropping snippets of chatter into the mix to make her pop songs feel lived in. In the past half decade, rousay has become known for eliciting the rawest of feelings using the sparsest of elements, recreating life’s most tender moments with an illusion of simplicity.

On a little death, her latest album and the final entry in a trilogy that includes a heavenly touch and a softer focus, rousay dials back her usual relentless probing for a more straightforward investigation of the dark unknown. Built primarily around recordings made at dusk, these songs function as conversations between rousay and her contemporaries, seamlessly weaving in samples from the work of close collaborators like more eaze and M. Sage. Granular drones are her controlled variables of choice here, always bubbling under live instrumental samples with the rapid, subtle vibrations of busy nighttime crickets. Years in the making, a little death is rousay’s most polished and straightforward work, one that seeks to take her from collagist to capital-C Composer.

Some of the record’s best moments feel directly connected to last year’s sentiment. While a little death abandons that album’s singer-songwriter structures, rousay’s strengths as a vocalist and musician carry over. “night one” revolves around a rugged, buoyant emo guitar riff packed with nostalgia. Rousay’s Auto-Tuned croons stall, delivered with an aloofness that makes her sound both fed up and desperate. On “somewhat burdensome,” her guitar navigates each phrase with difficulty, like she can barely make it to the next note safely. There’s a clear focus on individual tones and the ways they bend around empty space, a detail that gives her playing urgency and bears out her background in minimalism.

What made rousay’s earlier work so exciting was how shrouded in mystery it was, thanks to the asymmetrical, sometimes erratic placement of found sounds. t4t, one of her best projects, exploited the microphone as a tool to convey physical touch in sound, letting short whispers, deep breaths, and arrhythmic drum hits build tension with no clear goal in mind. A similar ambiguity distinguished a heavenly touch, the first entry of her trilogy, where exceptionally contrasting fidelities marked a clear separation between discrete recordings. A little death doesn’t wield found sounds in the same disjointed manner; instead, rousay seems interested in how sounds can lose definition, easily melting into one another. On “doubt,” a drone grows in tandem with static electronic whirrs. Buried samples of chattering voices blend into the textural fog, their shape indistinguishable from rain, a moving field recorder, or modulating electronic waveforms. In “conditional love,” a high-pitched drone and Andrew Weathers’ ringing lap steel fuse into what sounds less like two separate instruments than trembling electrical feedback. The interplay of sounds is unusually tight and the mixing just as meticulous, a real compositional development for rousay.

rousay is pushing her music in a more theatrical direction than ever before, and it pays off most on the title track. At the start, Gretchen Korsmo extends breathy clarinet notes, moving toward a cascade of more eaze’s long violin strokes and rustling leaves. It all slowly fades into a low buzz, then crashes back down like a wave, washing away everything in its path. We end with nothing but our beloved drone and the sound of insects in the night. rousay sounds like she’s controlling both a computer and the natural world with a baton in her hand.