What made rousay’s earlier work so exciting was how shrouded in mystery it was, thanks to the asymmetrical, sometimes erratic placement of found sounds. t4t, one of her best projects, exploited the microphone as a tool to convey physical touch in sound, letting short whispers, deep breaths, and arrhythmic drum hits build tension with no clear goal in mind. A similar ambiguity distinguished a heavenly touch, the first entry of her trilogy, where exceptionally contrasting fidelities marked a clear separation between discrete recordings. A little death doesn’t wield found sounds in the same disjointed manner; instead, rousay seems interested in how sounds can lose definition, easily melting into one another. On “doubt,” a drone grows in tandem with static electronic whirrs. Buried samples of chattering voices blend into the textural fog, their shape indistinguishable from rain, a moving field recorder, or modulating electronic waveforms. In “conditional love,” a high-pitched drone and Andrew Weathers’ ringing lap steel fuse into what sounds less like two separate instruments than trembling electrical feedback. The interplay of sounds is unusually tight and the mixing just as meticulous, a real compositional development for rousay.
rousay is pushing her music in a more theatrical direction than ever before, and it pays off most on the title track. At the start, Gretchen Korsmo extends breathy clarinet notes, moving toward a cascade of more eaze’s long violin strokes and rustling leaves. It all slowly fades into a low buzz, then crashes back down like a wave, washing away everything in its path. We end with nothing but our beloved drone and the sound of insects in the night. rousay sounds like she’s controlling both a computer and the natural world with a baton in her hand.
