If you have listened to the music of Philadelphia-based Clarke Sondermann in recent years, both as Pleasure Systems and The Washboard Abs, you will know that it is as intensely personal as it is inventive and distinctive. Sondermann has continually experimented with style, from lo-fi pop releases on Z Tapes and Antiquated Future Records to forays into jazzy art pop and dance music.
But regardless of form, Sondermann’s music always constitutes a document of a life, one that has known its fair share of hardship. Prior to the release of 2017’s Antnumbra Pull, his partner Ed was diagnosed with cancer, a life-changing development which understandably became the focus of much of the songs. The result served as a “reminder that everything we have in this life deserves our utmost love and attention,” we wrote at the time, “and that we’d do well not to take it for granted for a single second.”
After Ed’s death in June 2019, Sondermann began writing songs in isolation, creating a mass of demos that would become the new Pleasure Systems album, Visiting the Well which releases on Orchid Tapes later this week. If previous records were about suffering and worry, this is an album about grief. An album where pain, confusion and love are woven into twelve songs as unflinchingly direct as diary entries, presenting loss as it is processed in real time. The lyrical immediacy is countered by an often dreamy and drifting sound, a duality that conjures the weightless aftermath of loss where time is both too quick and too slow. A shapeless pocket within which there is little to do but collect signs of what has been and what remains, a deep hollow in normal time that feels like it might just go on for ever. “This summer stretches to an empty swollen blur,” goes a particularly emblematic line on opening track ‘Blur,’ “I spend the days making mosaics out of hurt.”
Visiting the Well exists within and around this cavity, Sondermann never far from its mysterious depths. Emotions range from quiet despair (e.g. on ’10:13) and yearning (as on ‘Blur’ or ‘Through Your Eyes’), to a sense of pure disbelief. “Mom is it real?” asks ‘Life Sized,’ “oh I swore he would heal, I could feel it.” But even amongst the album’s bluntest moments, Sondermann retains an ability to find beauty in the most unlikely places. Like on ‘When Your Beard Fell Out’, which likens the moment his partner’s hair turned white overnight to the turn and fall of leaves in autumn. “There is beauty,” Sondermann sings, “in the colour palette of demise.”
It’s in this way that, almost inadvertently, Visiting the Well becomes as much a celebration of love as a document of loss. Immediate thoughts coalesce with memories, anguish swirls with past joys and the current stark absence muddles with a previous, very real, presence. As with all loss, there is no simple lesson learned, no lasting consolation. There is only what was and what still can be, all there below the surface. Love, like grief, is a depth that will always be present. You can visit it at any time.
Clarke was kind enough to answer some questions about the record, so read on for more in-depth discussion on style, working with Orchid Tapes, and grief in twenty-first century America.
You describe Visiting the Well as “pretty raw, even embarrassingly earnest.” Even for someone who’s used to writing and sharing music about personal subject matter, this one must be scary to release into the world?
It’s very intimidating for me to release, and I’ve gone through a lot of cycles of wanting to scrap it or even move on from making music altogether. Ultimately, my personal hope in releasing these songs is to achieve a sense of catharsis; holding onto these songs over the last year has felt like a heavy secret and I’m ready to get it off my chest.
The album is being released on Orchid Tapes, which is very cool. How did that come about?
I’ve been a long time admirer of Orchid Tapes, and connected with Warren Hildebrand (who runs the label) online last year. We started talking after he responded to a video I posted of me taking my PrEP dose while drinking a grapefruit Moscow mule, which is absurd in retrospect, but we became good friends shortly after. At some point I sent him the album and he said that it “destroyed” and “devastated” him, which I took as a good sign.
I had already been talking to a couple other labels, but decided I wanted to work with Orchid Tapes because of Warren’s careful respect for the project and willingness to let me maintain control over the direction of the release. He approaches releases from the perspective of collaborating to make something beautiful, rather than maximizing market appeal. As it turns out, I wouldn’t have been able to finish the album without his guidance, encouragement, mixing help and excellent mastering.
Since finishing this album, we’ve also been working on a slate of new songs collaboratively, where we send each other barebones song ideas and help each other flesh them out, which I’m really excited about. Warren’s a brilliant musician and engineer, and working together continues to be one of the best collaborative relationships I’ve found.
Musically speaking, the new album is a pretty big departure from your last release, Terraform. What were you aiming for style-wise when writing it, and where do you see it fitting in your body of work as both Pleasure Systems and The Washboard Abs?
I had actually set an intention for myself to not consider any kind of “listener” or share any of my work with friends for the first six months of writing after my partner’s death, so I wasn’t making conscious decisions when it came to style or sound. Removing the consideration of how it would be received was very generative for me – this album is a trimmed collection of 35 songs that I wrote one after another in a pretty fluid way during that time.
The most obvious departure from my typical process was that I got very interested in playing guitar again after having steered towards electronic music. At that time I was living with my close friend Kasra (of the band Palm) and he let me borrow his nylon string guitar for months on end, which helped everything click and pour out of me. I was still finding great comfort in listening to a lot of minimal synth music – I was particularly obsessed with Colleen’s album A Flame My Love, A Frequency, Steve Hauschildt’s album Strands, and Meitei’s album Komachi. I think that deeply listening to such beautiful and environmental yet sparse electronic albums informed the arrangements and meshed well with the confessional, guitar-oriented writing I was doing.
I’m curious about the title – What does Visiting the Well refer to and why did you choose that phrase to name the album?
It was actually directly inspired by a tweet I was really impacted by, which feels funny to say. One of my favorite accounts, @chunkbardey tweeted “my experience of grief has been that the deep well of sadness has never gone away I just visit it less.” I loved this visual, but I wanted the title to be a bit of a double entendre as well. In the year and a half leading up to my partner’s death, my life was completely enmeshed in a world of sickness, spending endless days and nights in hospitals. Emerging from that world felt like I was merely visiting the “well,” as opposed to the “sick.” A huge part of me felt like it was still stuck in the hospitals. Funny enough, one of my close friends, who records under the name Body Meat, came to a similar place independently of me with his single ‘The Well’ from last fall. I think it’s a really versatile visual.
We last did an interview like this for Antumbra Pull in late 2017. One of your quotes stood out. “I’m sitting with a lot of fear and it shows up in the songs more than I want it to,” you said, “so I’m consciously trying to shift into writing from a more hopeful perspective.” Do you hear courage and hope in these new songs?
Not really, to be honest. I think it’s a fairly direct style of songwriting, like an observation log of whatever I was reflecting on that day. The album isn’t entirely sequential in terms of the order the songs were written in, but the final two songs, ‘When I Picture You Now’ and ‘The Maze’ I wrote several months later than the rest. My grief had transformed and settled a bit by then, and I think there’s an audibly different perspective in those two – a little more acceptance maybe, but not quite hope. It was a devastating loss and I’m still processing it in many ways. I think that trying to twist it into a hopeful narrative would have been dishonest to both myself and the listener.
Was making the album a purely personal way for you to move through your feelings? Or do you think about the effects it will have on that nameless, faceless “listener” too?
It was purely personal – like I said before, I forced myself to go at least six months without even showing friends what I was working on. Once I had the songs selected for the album, it took me over a year to finish editing and refining them, but the motivation was much more to make something that felt true to my experience as opposed to just making songs that would be well received.
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=571739929 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=2588068443]
This is a difficult time for lots of people, and many are going through similar experiences of grief. If there is someone reading this who is going through what you have/are, would you like to say anything to them?
Part of my anxiety around releasing this album is that, as you said, this is an incredibly difficult time for so many people, and there is so much grief surrounding all of us right now; the immediate grief of those lost to Covid, but also grieving the loss of our “normal” lives for a year now, grieving the more existential idea of lost futures, the disappearance of more hopeful political futures, etc.
Our society in America champions individualism above all else, and I do in some ways feel conflicted about promoting such an individual and isolated account of loss when we are all embedded in such a profound communal grief. I wish I was better equipped to tackle these things through a strictly collectivist lens. But, in the depths of my own grief, I benefited a lot from hearing my experience reflected back to me in music that centered something comparable to what I was going through. If my work can have a similar impact on someone else in the throes of grief, then it’s all worth it. There is a beautiful kind of solidarity in the connection that the listener can have with intimate, emotionally-driven music.
Visiting the Well will be released on 26th March. Pre-order it now on LP or cassette from the Orchid Tapes webstore, or digitally via their Bandcamp or the Pleasure Systems Bandcamp.
Photos by Emily Burtner, cover painting by Tina Scarpello