Hailing from Medford, Massachusetts and currently based in Brooklyn, Claire Dickson is a musician who uses creativity and improvisation to assemble stories in sounds. Homeschooled until attending Harvard to study psychology and music, she trained herself in jazz and improvisation thanks to a fascination with Ella Fitzgerald, and by the time she had finished high school had performed at the Kennedy Center as a Presidential Scholar in the Arts, Symphony Hall with the Boston Pops and the Monterey Jazz Festival with the Next Generation Jazz Orchestra. After various collaborations and further performances of note both during and after college, Dickson began work on her debut solo album, Starland.
The record originated on a tall ship in the Arctic Circle, which inspired Claire Dickson to weave a harmony that imitates and accentuates the sound of the tide on a rocky beach while anchored in a cove at night. On returning home, Dickson found herself still enchanted by “the simultaneous otherworldly and deeply personal experience of the undisturbed natural landscape in the Arctic,” and Starland was shaped into something of a concept album based around this experience. A “cohesive soundscape” that helps tease out a compelling narrative too.
To realise its glacial, expansive and moody style, this soundscape hops between genres. Jazz, ambient and art pop are all touchstones, but it is Dickson’s voice which takes centre stage and helps to knit these styles together. In this manner, she follows in the footsteps of Laurie Anderson and Meredith Monk, vocalists who utilised their voices as instruments through a blend of technique and electronics.
Lead single and title track ‘Starland’ is the perfect encapsulation of this style. Within the spacious quiet of the opening, Dickson’s vocals are just another element of the minimal soundscape, used more akin to synths that traditional vocals. The result is something almost primordial, a space wordless and prehuman gathering toward some higher, more natural logic. The track grows richer as it unfurls in lush reverb, though this creates a sense of distance too. The paradox at the heart of Starland which evokes that of the Arctic itself, where the environment is somehow both ethereal and profoundly physical.
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Starland is out now and you can get it from the Claire Dickson Bandcamp page.
