Nomadic Musings and Field Recordings with Claire Rousay

It was mid-December when we caught up with Claire Rousay at Bright Coffee. The colorful mid-century modern furniture, expansive white walls of the coffee shop and warm sounds of King Krule were a toasty break to the stinging cold and wind outside. Having recently returned from Australia, a jet-lagged Claire greeted us and walked us to a makeshift green room consisting of a solitary can light, cleaning supplies, a few chairs and a single foldable table whereupon it lay her rider: a stalk of bananas, a bottle of tequila, a few cans of sparkling water, and a single cigarette.

Despite the pandemic, it’s been an eventful past couple of years for San Antonio composer Claire Rousay. Since 2020 she’s moved to Los Angeles, had 22 bandcamp releases, raised money for the Trevor Project, was featured in New York Times Magazine, launched her own record label: American Dream Records, had her album A Softer Focus picked as one of Pitchforks Best 50 Albums of 2021, embarked on several tours through America, Europe and Australia, and even modeled in Milan.

Regardless of the extensive accolades racked up within the past couple of years, the emo-ambient artist remains unmoved. To herself, she is simply “a musician, an ex dog owner, a composer, and a wannabe artist.”

Far from her self-schematization descriptors, Rousay is an enigmatic producer forefronting a new generation of avant-garde sounds. She keeps her age a secret and her genre relatively ambiguous.

“Ambient music is an easier word for people to kind of grab on to. Rather than trying to say sound collage or sound author,” she said.

Glimpses to the inner workings of her life are tessellated into her music through the use of field recordings. Melancholic sounds of typewriter keys, crows cawing, lawn mowers running and car engines whirring are all poignant reminders of mundane experiences in her melange of dreamy soundscapes.

Apart from her idiosyncratic instrumentality, there are also tracks that bestrew the quiescent chaos of everyday heartbreaks through the use of Rousay’s poetry or text narrations. It Was Always Worth It, for example, is a collection of songs lyrically comprised by speech to text translations of a couple’s six year relationship and its subsequent demise.

“I really like being the voice sounds and using different voices”

One of Rousay’s unreleased tracks is inspired by Tumblr’s 2009 call-in audio features and by the vulnerability and carelessness of the internet. In the song, she uses a portion of a break up call that she found posted on YouTube.

As a child, Rousay’s mother taught her piano and most of what she knows about music. She took drumming lessons at the age of 10 and as a teen went on to play in several local acts, such as indie orchestra Deer Vibes and Elena Lopez’s short-lived punk project, Baby Bangs. Learning and picking up inspiration from her experiences in group projects, she eventually started creating music alone in 2018, but felt limited in using solely percussion.

“I was playing drums for myself and low key that sounds like shit.” she said. “I wasn't able to express what I really wanted to, using other instruments and other ways of viewing music. That was kind of the point where things started to change.”

Claire’s Texas Music Recommendations:

More Eaze (@more_eaze) -”My best friend. Really like a singular person, really like out there.”
Heather Leigh (@wishimage)- “She’s fucking sick, she’s like an experimental music rock star which i also think is sick, i’m really into Heather”
William Basinski (@musex1)- “Ambient legend. Amazing drama gay icon man person. He’s great, he’s from Houston too.”

Accepting that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Rousay began trying to mimic the field recording and fountain sound techniques of artists such as Lawrence English, Abby Lee Tee and Felicia Atkinson, whom she’s now all befriended.

Her songwriting process now begins with these field recordings and fountain sounds. She then deduces the textural elements and layers on melodies and harmonies, such as piano notes, experimenting with frequency ranges, imaginative tones, and apocryphal feelings, mixing them to her mind’s content.

Since her move to Los Angeles, her songwriting process has undergone little change, however it has created room for a few lifestyle adjustments. “I'm not in a familiar place, I might feel kind of isolated.”

Apart from that she grumbles about costs being “50,000 billion times more expensive”, the lack of access to good and cheap food (tacos), and longing for her friends.

The upside to the loneliness, $9 bean and cheese tacos and the high cost of living is the congenial accessibility to artistry she’s been able to witness in Los Angeles.

“Everybody tries to play a show in LA. So I get to go to so many shows of people that I've been trying to see for years that I would have to drive to Austin or Houston to see. And I'm like, ‘I'll drive 15 minutes and see the show and then go back home and sleep in my own bed and not try to die driving at night or something’.

And boy, is she familiar with exhaustion. As previously mentioned, she had just ended her second Australian tour and returned home to San Antonio for a few days before heading back to Los Angeles to embark on a tour with 2000’s ambient group Junior Boys, followed by a midwest and east coast tour in February. She is now currently in the middle of an 8 day European tour.

Sharing vignettes of her favorite touring locations while offering us bananas, we depart the green room as a pragmatic Rousay prepares to deliver an intimate and esoterically immersive performance.