The experience of repetition as death
130701/FatCat | LP13-39 | CD13-39 | DA13-39
Release date: April 3. 2020


Track listing :
All music composed by Clarice Jensen
Daily
Day tonight
Metastable
Holy Mother
Final


Available on LP, CD, and digital download:
130701 | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Boomkat | Spotify


Brooklyn-based cellist Clarice Jensen’s gorgeous sophomore album and first for FatCat’s pioneering 130701 imprint, The experience of repetition as death, was recorded and mixed by Francesco Donadello at Vox-Ton studios in Berlin in late 2018 and mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri. All of the material on this new album was written and performed by Jensen alone, and all of the sounds on it were created with a cello through a variety of effects and effects pedals.


The experience of repetition as death is a warm, deep and cyclical album that explores notions of repetition in both its conceptual underpinning and musical structure. Unlike the easily readable step builds and grid-locked looping of so many artists using the looper as a compositional tool, Jensen's loops slide across one another in organically morphing structures; align and intersect at different moments, yielding a kind of aleatoric yet minimal counterpoint, with joins overlaid in ways that appear seamless and sophisticated. Where her live performance relies heavily upon the use of loop pedals, in the studio she and Donadello recorded much of the material onto tape to create a series of physical loops. There’s something oceanic in the immensity of the resulting work – in the ebb and flow of her sound and the way it builds and dissipates through swelling and wave reflection.


Whilst in previous releases Jensen’s cello has largely been abstracted via effects to sound somewhat other than itself, The experience of repetition as death opens with an undisguised passage that is clearly wood and string – a clarity retained throughout much of the album.


The album’s title is taken from a line in a 1971 poem by the influential American radical feminist poet Adrienne Rich called A Valediction Forbidding Mourning – a response to a John Donne poem of the same title from 1611. Jensen expresses great admiration for Rich both as a writer and feminist icon, citing her as “an inspiration to create work in a field that is still largely male-dominated," and noting how “her poem to me is a reflection on the idea that dying and death are ordinary. Any meaningfulness we create comes from within and is deeply personal but entirely our own construct.”