claire rousay // a softer focus LP [BLACK/COLOR] / CD

Ambient artist Claire Rousay from Los Angeles, USA, will be joining American Dreams, an all-genre label based in Chicago, in 2021.This is an album released from

Contains 6 collage ambient songs with piano, field recordings, cello, and violin. LP comes with DL code.

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Available on 12" black vinyl, 12" orange vinyl, or 12" white vinyl. Includes DL code.

tracklist:

1. preston ave 01:36
2. discrete (the market) 06:34
3. peak chroma 08:48
4. diluted dreams 08:35
5. stoned gesture 04:49
6. a kind of promise 02:59

Text excerpt by American Dreams:

"Experimental musician Claire Rousay and visual artist Dani Toral have been in each others' orbit since young adulthood in San Antonio, but it took a decade for them to find A Softer Focus. Before Rousay had put her compositional gray matter to task for the album's music , she knew she wanted to work with Toral- being familiar with her past work centering her Mexican heritage. Toral's vibrant color palette and reinterpretations of comfort in oneself and the natural, vegetative world connected easily with her explorations in communication and intimacy. Historically, Rousay primarily operated in non-melodic experimental music, sculpting compositions from obsessive field recordings, inserting voice-to-text, percussion played via text message sounds, conversations, and daily life. By contrast, the six-song collection and collaborative project A Softer Focus is lush and almost entirely melodic, even veiling into pop at a couple points.

Though Rousay created the album's recordings, Toral created the artwork and visual narrative for the album - the recurring floral motifs and designs, the photography, the video work, and the ceramic whistles that accompany a special edition of the vinyl record. She also assisted in crafting the linguistic framework, assisting with song titles, and coming up with the name of the album - “A Softer Focus” became the album's central motif, alluding to the meditative or recollective-dream state of creating. Toral, being primarily a painter and ceramicist, took on this challenge of working digitally to create a visual language accompanying the music. She wanted to explore the feelings of present familiarity she felt with Rousay, through warm light and glow while mimicking the flow of the music using her organic soft shapes melding together and creating a portal-like entry to the album. Fittingly, the songs gently amble from one to the next, creating a syrupy, hypnagogic narrative that uses string sections, field recordings, and vocals to touch upon love, friendship, endurance, and transcendence - sounding like what living inside a brain must feel like, oscillating on how far to let its guest in..."

Artist: claire rousay

Label: American Dreams