The Substation/​ Artist/​claire rousay/

claire rousay is a Canadian-American musician, composer, and artist currently living in Los Angeles. rousay’s work operates in genre-spanning fashion; she is primarily known for composing highly emotive, whisper-quiet musical works that heavily forefront musique concrète and sound design elements like haptic sound and field recordings. These avant garde elements are often paired with strings, piano, and electronic melodies and textures. Her albums in this vein – on celebrated labels like Thrill Jockey and Shelter Press – gained her notoriety in the international ambient and experimental community.

rousay remains stylistically mercurial and incorporates generic elements from rock, electronic, hyperpop, noise, folk, free jazz, and more into her compositions. In some ways rousay is always busy making music about music, and too, music about everyday life, about the ordinary. A delicate and deeply timbrel quality is helixed into the musical components of rousay’s work. Quotidian sounds and spoken word elements are woven into melodies that have been temporally manipulated; time is compressed and expanded, chords are frozen in place, instances take eternities, and occurrences flash by with immediacy. Her work investigates styles, forms, times, and experiences. In this way, rousay is a formalist – interested in the material of music and sound, in technique – and yet her work is profoundly emotive and incredibly impressionistic.

rousay has performed at esteemed festivals and venues internationally; notably Unsound (Krakow), Big Ears (Knoxville), Rewire (The Hague), and Le Guess Who (Utrecht). She’s installed or exhibited her work at ICA (London) and Art Gallery of NSW (Sydney). She’s done artist residencies at Ina GRM (Paris), The Momentary (Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art), and WORM Sound Studios (Rotterdam). She’s also given artist talks and workshops at renowned institutions worldwide regarding her practice as an artist, composer, and listener.