CLARISSA CONNELLY

As a durational medium, music is uniquely suited to describing the passage of time. For Clarissa Connelly, whose beguiling album World of Work was released on Warp in April of this year, centuries of human experience are collapsed into 42 minutes of lush, plaintive balladry. Inspired by Georges Bataille’s Eroticism and the medieval polymath Hildegard of Bingen, the album considers our short time on this lonely planet and what mechanisms we use to weather it. Enya and 50 Words for Snow-era Kate Bush are touchpoints, and Connelly’s sonic language is not altogether dissimilar from that of her Danish counterparts Erika de Casier, Astrid Sonne and ML Buch, who trained alongside Connelly at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen. Yet World of Work is undeniably its own beast, as wise and dignified as an old church bell, cementing Connelly as horologist extraordinaire and one of the most rewarding folk artists in the current scene. Listen to Connelly’s mix, and read her interview with TANK below.

TANK Work is a word that comes loaded with so many significations: the practice of music as a kind of job, work as an element of capitalism, or the idea of self-work as a means of achieving transcendence. What is the “world of work” that you are describing?
CLARISSA CONNELLY In all movements and all things we do, there is work. It was the term I thought I could use that could frame the movements in the album, a little theatre piece in which they could all operate. I know that Bataille uses the word work to refer to the profane, everyday life we have: getting up in the morning, going to bed, going to work, having conversations, working physically, being in the world we're in now. But I think there's a very magical element to work, as it’s in those movements that ecstasy or oscillation can happen. It has to be in movements, whether it’s the movements of the brain or a movement like meditation. 

TANK I'm interested in the idea of oscillation: so much of what we consider music is the result of vibration and oscillation. I particularly wanted to speak about bells in this context, of which there are many on the album.
CC I was trying to find what sounds can represent society as it is around us and what we've been born into. Bells are what frame society in many cultures, particularly in Christianity, but also before that. We've used sound to set different time marks in a day and we've used it for alarm and celebration. It was the perfect symbol to create this frame, where there's a beginning and an end.

TANK  The openness of bells creates a sense of connection with a historical past. Does referencing older music have a similar function for you?
CC Yeah, definitely. Music can bind times together. One of my references for ‘Wee Rosebud’ is Hildegard of Bingen and how she writes melodies. I love listening to old music, but what's more interesting to me is trying to combine sounds that are very recognisable in an unrecognisable way, because that gives me a sense that there is no past or future, a feeling of disappearing. That can be through a chord shift or a melody going out of key, trying to brush out the frames of time and to clear associations. I wrote the album during the 2020s so you're probably gonna hear that in the music.

TANK How do you maintain those elements of surprise within the composition?
CC Sometimes it's done with force, trying to find where the melody should turn. Sometimes it's looking for the right note to land on. You need a clean slate when you’re writing: you can't do that if your mailbox is filled with emails you have to answer or you have a relationship issue that's filling up your mind. When I’m writing and trying to clear my head, I go for long walks by myself. Everything has to be cleared from my brain before I can start being creative. 

TANK You grew up with a strict Catholic upbringing. I did as well. What you're describing to me sounds like a kind of reverence  that occurred when I used to go to church, allowing space for silence and for ideas to take shape. There's a sense that we all have to be quiet to let thought flow. Do you feel like there is a ghost or spectre of Catholicism in your work?
CC We all know that feeling of being little children sitting for hours, being so bored, and trying to find something to have some fun with. It's in those moments where there's a lot of creativity. A church is the perfect place for getting new ideas. I don't go to church that often: I do when I'm out in a new city to see a new space and I can sit down for a while. I don't know how I understand myself yet in belief. My family is still really Catholic and there's an aspect of brainwash growing up with parents who both believe in God. I don't think my brain can disconnect from some of those ideas. Music can give me the biggest feeling of peace and belonging to being a part of something that's really beautiful. I think my parents were very aware of linking the belief in God to a beauty that surrounds us, and that probably has stuck with me, that beauty is holy somehow. That's our task as human beings, to give in to that. 

TANK In World of Work, there is an acceptance of apocalypse not as a defining calamitous event but doom as a constant, ambient essence. How do you view apocalypse and how did it weave its way through this album?
CC I wanted to write about the great transformation. That's a big part of healing when you’ve lost someone, being in life knowing we have to die. I think I wanted to write about that as something inevitable and not too big of a deal. The circumstances of being here are that there is some kind of transformation at some point. That happens to everything around us. I wanted to be a part of the small movements that give ecstasy, diving into what they are, but also knowing that the big transformation is death. I wanted to frame it into an epic, the apocalypse, the big death because that’s everyone’s death. I wanted it to be like a circumstance that goes out through the whole album, of accepting that, because that's how it is.