claire rousay – “Peak Chroma”

claire rousay – “Peak Chroma”

Last month, claire rousay announced a new album, A Softer Focus, the latest in a long line of releases from the San Antonio-based ambient musician. The album is a collaboration with visual artist Dani Toral, who directed the video for new single “Peak Chroma,” an expansively stretchy space-out punctuated by mumbled vocals (that include a reference to blackbear) and a creeping sense of unease.

“Peak Chroma is one of two tracks on a softer focus featuring sung lyrical content,” rousay said in a statement. “The lyrics for it started as an iPhone Notes entry. This entry was a reminder to not fall into traps of nostalgia and the second-guessing that sometimes follows that. Reminiscing on something that not only is in the past but is something that is never coming back…”

Watch the video below, which has an abbreviated version of the song.

And here’s the full 9-minute track:

Here’s Toral’s statement on the visuals:

The Peak Chroma music video was made using collected footage in and around my studio, where Claire and I spent a lot of our time working on “a softer focus”. From some of the audio in the album, to press photos and whistles, to almost the entire music video, my studio became a very central space for this project (even one of the tracks is named after it). The music video captures a balance of stillness and movement with sections of repetitive and meditative motion mimicking a flow state of creation we both experience in our practice. The cohesion of the music video with the album art and audio was very important hence the correlations of the portal-like entries to a dream state which is the feeling we wanted to create in this entire project. This video feels like you’re in a familiar dream, one of warmth and comfort through overlapping and superimposed images of Claire and I working or doing mundane tasks. The Peak Chroma video shares intimate moments of our experience working together, and documents the essence of “a softer focus.’

A Softer Focus is out 4/9 via American Dreams Records. Pre-order it here.

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