In recent years, claire rousay and zander raymond have established themselves as two of the most prolific and innovative sound artists in the experimental space, both eschewing genre conventions in order to create music that’s both stylistically novel and emotionally authentic. So it seems fitting the pair have teamed up for something good, a full-length coming early next year with Thrill Jockey Records which sees rousay and raymond combine their distinctive sensibilities to create something altogether new. The record was written via open ended communication between their Los Angeles and Chicago homes and recorded within ostensibly humble domestic settings, both artists experienced enough to recognise the value in allowing ideas to flower without too much by way of conscious invention. “It was made far more spontaneously… more just playing,” as raymond explains. “Music making [is] a broad umbrella that spans from sitting down intentionally to compose and leaving a field recorder rolling.”
Lead single ‘can’t we have both’ hints at the result. One of a couple of vocal tracks on something good, and, structurally, perhaps the closest claire rousay and zander raymond get to a traditional song, ‘can’t we have both’ lives up to its name in both theme and form, combining pop traditions with avant garde abstraction to explore the experience of the artist with a commodified, endlessly distracted world. “Feeling washed up in the used cd store / it’s a burden, it’s a triumph / my industry evaporates and it doesn’t need me anymore,” as the opening verse goes, though as the careful, almost hesitant sound slowly blooms across the length of the track, what at first sounds like fatalism begins to appear as something different. A disappointment yes, plus a clear frustation with the breakneck speed at which our culture cycles through its desires and needs, but also, if you listen closely enough, a nascent sense of possibility. If the CD stores are deserted, if the music industry eats itself, if every present trend is destined to dissolve into the next without any lasting impression, then what’s left to the artist? Perhaps it is just finding one another in the constant motion, conversing and creating, making art free from the baggage of expectation.
