Every once in a while there’s a little death – a shedding skin, a broken promise, a memory growing fonder.
I sat on the couch of my mother’s house, coming back after a tarot reading.
After a cigarette, after a car ride.
I sit, and I listen the album in one go, as I’m in the process of dying a little – the reading was precise, it left me nowhere to go but here, listening and writing. As I listen, a memory is painted, a fiction of my reality becomes closer to my film-mind as I’m in between the noises of moving through something, a space, a feeling, in-between conversations, stopped by you to hear your voice, sat on the couch of my mother’s house. My mind moves with this music, as it reminds me how a memory is made – colour, softness, fragments, haziness, some heaviness despite the absence of mass and form – it has a way of occupying my subconscious, as I form a past form of my present, while looking through the window of a becoming. “I couldn’t find the light”, confessing into a tape-recorder, a double-edged feeling of a minute before you (i) tell me (you) everything. What’s about to happen is where everything happens. “conditional love” is as it is: hard to swallow but there as it may. Dissonance shows you how to love despite condition, or in condition. Red on purple are the colours I get. Every song title seems to be a fragment of a continuing conversation, something still between you and me, maybe a little death. “just” then, a little peace.
The words “unsaid”, “undone” and “forgiving” keep showing up together as they form images, like pictures of something that becomes special because now there is a picture of it. In those pictures the unsaid and undone become. And there is a sound to it, I can listen to it inside.
As I keep listening I find comfort and hope in these titles; “doubt” showing me a way when there seems to be none, done or gone. As I meditate about doubt and unknowingness, I wanna move into it, showing up with nothing but showing up. Scared and scarred. But you’ve got everything, said the witch.
Going with the doubt > staying with the fear.
The past months I have been in between home and becoming, not knowing what I needed was dying once more.
It isn’t about resolutions, but this music moves you through something. It takes you to a dream state, from being asleep to a look in the mirror in the earliest morning before anything else. It tells you something new might even be there waiting for you, but you need to die a little first – so take that time to die, let it die, and you’ll walk again. The rest will follow.
Claire Rousay is now touring with “a little death” in the US and Canada. Check the dates here – go see concerts, buy music, bring a lover or a friend, go on a solo date.
