Claire Rousay - Everything Perfect Is Already Here

  • Claire Rousay's most ambient album blends strings, field recordings and voice into one lovely blur.
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  • Claire Rousay called her last album Sometimes I Feel Like I Have No Friends. This one could've been titled Shit, I Guess I Do. While Sometimes I Feel Like I Have No Friends was a claustrophobic expression of self-doubt, full of personal anecdotes and therapeutic confessions, Everything Perfect Is Already Here is convivial and warm, with a lively chamber-jazz feel reminiscent of small-band ambient classics like Harold Budd's Pavilion Of Dreams and the Penguin Café Orchestra's Music From The Penguin Café, instead of the rustled sheets and spilled thoughts that define Rousay's intensely personal emo ambient style. "I talk about myself too much," she admitted on Sometimes I Have No Friends, the irony being that she's talking about herself throughout the whole album-length track. As "It Feels Foolish To Care" opens this new record, we think Rousay's going to talk about herself—"um, I think," she stutters—before her words are subsumed into Mari Maurice and Alex Cunningham's strings. The next comprehensible dialogue we hear is about how great it is to have friends in your life. It almost seems like a reaction to her recent work, and not just because she's looking outward rather than inward for inspiration. If Sometimes I Feel Like I Have No Friends took Rousay's self-absorption to the extreme, so did her last album with Maurice's More Eaze project, Never Stop Texting Me, a brash hyperpop album that's surely the first record ever to reference Kali Malone, Bandcamp Day and Third Eye Blind in one go. More Eaze's first release after Never Stop Texting Me was Oneiric, a similarly sumptuous and string-drenched album where human voices were filtered and blurred past the point of comprehension. Likewise, Rousay takes care that there's nothing we'll recognize here, nothing that will trigger the Barnum effect instead of forcing the listener to draw their own conclusions. Behind Rousay's band runs an endless stream of field recordings, most of them hard-to-place compared to the obvious sounds of flushing toilets and barking dogs that tend to fill the margins of Rousay's other work. Everything Perfect Is Already Here sounds a little like listening to a movie without seeing the images, absorbing both the sound effects and the score with no context. It's harder to love than the searingly intimate work she's known for, but it's brave in that it completely casts aside relatability. This is some of her most absolute music, impassive and impenetrable, demanding we come to it rather than coming to us. It's the first Claire Rousay album that could plausibly be made by a 50-year-old (like Graham Lambkin, whose Amateur Doubles is a similar two-fer of cryptic collages and improvisation) rather than a self-proclaimed "millennial sun, zoomer rising." Ambient fans unfamiliar with Rousay's work might enjoy this one more than longtime followers. Usually with Rousay we find ourselves asking what she's trying to tell us, here we're forced to take these sounds as sounds as they are and decide whether or not we like them. If it's as simple as that, liking Everything Perfect Is Already Here should be easy for most people—it's her most capital-A ambient album, without the sometimes harsh interference of her favored found sounds and field recordings. Yet at the same time, it's so quiet that it slips into the edges of comprehension just when you've determined you're going to get to the bottom of it. All the better to listen to it again to see what you missed—and then again, and again and again.
  • Tracklist
      01. It Feels Foolish To Care 02. Everything Perfect Is Already Here
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