“A Softer Focus” by Claire Rousay & Dani Toral

 


By Connor Dillman

My first experience of a softer focus, the collaborative new record from experimental musician Claire Rousay and visual artist Dani Toral, came against the blurry backdrop of earth-toned landscapes lining the I-5 freeway during a seven-hour drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The original plan was to throw it on, let it percolate a bit, and generate some initial ideas for a review of the album. Hundreds of miles later, as the San Francisco Bay reflected the setting sun out the window, I had listened to it eight times in a row.

My intentions shifted direction at that point. This was a piece that had oozed into every crevice of my brain in warm, ambient throbs. Across the six tracks, a subterranean world of haptic clicks, luminous string arrangements, and glitchy bits of muffled conversation were stitched into a life-affirming womb of sound. This was a gift, and I wanted to trace it back to its sources.

Given the theme of this Issue 11, Glow, an interview with rousay and Toral seemed like a natural choice. While the album itself certainly evokes the multitude of feelings attached to that word, its authors had clearly embodied a uniquely radiant symbiosis in their creating it. Rousay, a prolific artist whose compositions have often revolved around field recordings and repurposed everyday objects, found a foil in Toral, a Mexican painter and ceramicist who has exhibited in spaces such as the San Francisco Art Institute, Linda Warren Projects in Chicago, and the New York Academy of Art, to name a few. Her recent exploration into floral subject matter arrived just in time to find its way into the album’s packaging design, and her first foray into video made for a gorgeous visual interpretation of “Peak Chroma,” the album’s third track. Both artists are based in San Antonio, where they came together to make something that will stand on its own as long as there are ears to hear it.

Over an hour-long video call, I spoke to them about their routines, personal spaces, dreams, and the company they keep. Their love for their crafts and each other was palpable throughout—they were glowing, if you will. So grab your beverage of choice, press play on the record, and enjoy this conversation with the brains behind a softer focus.

 
Claire & Dani

Claire & Dani

 

After living with this album over the past couple days, I felt this kind of looping nature to the whole world of it between what Dani worked on with the Peak Chroma video and what you worked on with the music Claire. Have you guys have felt any parts of your lives reflecting that cyclical feeling lately?

Dani Toral (DT): Yeah, I mean definitely the first thing that comes to mind is the pandemic. I haven’t been in San Antonio for this long before, and when you’re here for this long things can get repetitive. Having to stay put for a while in the same place is something I haven’t done since I was in high school, so I’m definitely trying to find new ways to make things exciting, but even in the studio things can become a little repetitive. I recently went to Pennsylvania, which was a nice break from San Antonio, but yeah, the entire year has been here.

Claire, have you paid any particular attention to that feeling recently?

Claire Rousay (CR): Yeah, I’ve been having kind of a similar experience to Dani. I was basically touring for like ten years before this, and now everything is obviously really fucked up. Just feeling kind of stuck and having limited contact and interactions with people feels kind of cyclical. Dani and I each only have a couple people we see, so it’s been really interesting to kind of interact with the same people over and over again, because generally that would just be what friendship is. But in this specific situation, it’s way more emotionally intensive because you’re not conditioned to be out interacting with people in person all the time. And everyone you’re interacting with, which is only like two or three people, are all going through the same shit too.

Off of that, what do both of your routines look like now?

CR: What are yours?

Well I get up and journal first thing, then I meditate, then make breakfast. But I take forever, just thawing really slowly. I like taking my time so that it’s brain dump and relaxation and pleasure and food for the first half of the day, then I take myself a little more seriously after. But what about you guys?

CR: I really like kicking the morning off early. I’ve been waking up at 6am every day, which is abnormal because I usually get into trouble at night. But I can’t do that anymore, so I’ve adopted a lot of healthier habits, but yeah, I like the same thing in the morning: making breakfast, doing coffee. I’ll usually read for an hour. I’m reading like ten books right now—people send books now in the mail, so I’m trying to read those.

Any of them standing out to you? If you were to recommend . . .

CR: I just read this collection of short stories called Kink, and so reading kink shit in the morning you get real horny real quickly. But yeah just wake up, do breakfast, read, and then basically work until 2:30 or 3pm and then take the rest of the day off.

What about you Dani?

DT: My routines have changed a little bit. While I was working on this project, it pretty much forced me into a routine because before I was kind of all over the place. But having deadlines and meetings really made me stay on track. So I would wake up, come to the studio in my backyard—I meditate in there since it’s the only quiet space in the house right now—and then get started on making the whistles [sold as merch with the record]. I would do that from like 8am to about 2pm, and that’s around when I like to get something to eat. From there I would check in with my family because I was living with them and they have several projects going on, so I would see if I needed to run any errands for them. Then at night, my winding down was working on design stuff on my iPad.

Claire, where’s your studio?

CR: Lifts camera above desk

Ooh there we go.

CR: Yeah my recording studio setup is in my bedroom. There’s only one main room in the house, so I don’t really like having any gear out. It feels weird to have it in the living room where you listen to records and hang out and stuff.

What’s your relationship to your workspace right now?

CR: I would prefer to have a separate studio, like a separate building. The place I’m in right now I really want to buy because it has a whole lot next door that’s basically the size of two lots, and it’s pretty close to downtown. Dani and I live on opposite sides of town.

DT: We’re like five minutes from each other, but opposite ends of the city.

CR: It’s really cute. But yeah I want to do the same thing, kind of a backyard or side yard studio. But you know, that requires money.

I hear you. I’m staying at a friend’s loft right now and I’m in dreamland. It’s making me go that much harder to have my own studio because oh my god it’s so different.

CR: I’m always jealous of Dani’s space. Every time I go over it’s so much fun.

DT: I actually built it right before this project, so it was kind of perfect timing. We had a place to work on things like press photos or whatever we needed to do.

Are you in there right now Dani?

DT: Yeah this is the ceramic space. I’m primarily a painter, so when I came back from Berlin and the pandemic hit, I had to stay here with my parents. This was a garage that was kind of falling apart, so I asked them if I could make it a ceramic studio space for myself because I needed somewhere to work. Now that they’re moving out, my boyfriend and I are renting it from them, so now I have a painting space and a ceramic space—I haven’t painted in like three years.

Do you miss it?

DT: Oh yeah.

CR: That’s how Dani and I started thinking about working together. I bought a bunch of her paintings.

Really? How did you find her?

CR: We met in middle school.

DT: We’ve been in each other’s orbit for a while, but now that we’re adults and have careers we were like let’s work together.

CR: We were also in different spaces, because Dani was in Berlin and doing residencies in places like Baltimore. You know, doing everything that I wasn’t.

Dani I wanted to ask—I’ve seen a lot of your other work, and I noticed that the floral stuff has been somewhat recent. Is there a place you think that came from? Was it from the album?

DT: It kind of started a little bit before. I was exploring it through drawing and painting, but my work up until very recently has been mainly about where I come from. I’m from Mexico, so I get a lot of my motifs and themes from my heritage. So it had a lot to do with that, and also finding comfort in my own body. But now that I’ve gotten a little more comfortable, I’ve felt for the past year like I’ve been wanting to break out of that a little bit and explore themes around growth, nature, and getting comfortable with discomfort. So that was in my head when Claire and I decided to work together. And then a lot of Claire’s music is about intimacy and communication, which are themes that I have explored before but I definitely wanted to dive into more. It just kind of clicked for me that the vegetative and floral motifs represented that kind of growth.

That’s really cool. Claire—in one of the album press blurbs I got, it mentioned a kind of dream state effect, especially in the visuals, that you guys might have had in mind for this project. What’s your relationship to dreams?

CR: I used to be really into lucid dreaming and keeping a dream journal, but I kind of lost that over the years from touring. I feel like my life was so hectic for such a long time that dreaming was—well there are two kinds of dreams right? One is when you’re sleeping and the other is your goals and aspirations. And for a very long period of time I didn’t have either of those. I had no aspirations and no life goals or anything I wanted to accomplish. So at night when I would dream it would feel kind of irrelevant.

That’s interesting. Does that feel new? Because you’ve been making so much recently.

CR: Yeah I mean it’s slowly coming back. But I have pretty fucked up dreams. I take a bunch of anxiety medication, so depending on what I’m taking I either have no dreams at all or I have really fucked up dreams. I have this recurring dream that takes place in different situations—it’s a true nightmare. I have a lot of anxiety about feeling trapped emotionally in relationships, which is why I ruin my life all the time, but also physically I have a lot of claustrophobia issues. So I have this dream where I’m essentially in a concentration camp . . . it’s real heavy shit. I’ve had that dream consistently since I was in high school and still have it.

Have you ever felt compelled to exercise that via music?

CR: No I mean like—ambient music for concentration camps is not exactly. . .

No I know. I’ve had sleep paralysis with really visual visitors in those dreams, and there was a time where I was drawing all of them, so I have this drawer of demonic drawings. I found, to what you’re saying, that it didn’t really put them elsewhere. It kind of just put them in another part of my life.

CR: Yeah I mean I kind of like avoiding all of my problems, so I don’t want to focus on them. What do the demonic kind of sleep paralysis figures look like? I’ve had that happen before and they’re always blue.

Oh interesting. Well this is a specific detail, but they always have some sort of crown that’s melded into their head. It’s strange.

CR: Dani do you have fucked up dreams?

DT: No! This is so fascinating to me because I don’t remember when I dream. I feel like in my everyday life I’m such an overthinker that everything happens for me during the day. But my sister has sleep paralysis too and my best friend has very vivid, fantasy-driven dreams. I just can’t relate.

Do you not dream at all?

DT: I just don’t remember them. When I do remember them, it’s something really realistic. Like the other day I dreamt that my best friend died. To me it felt so real. I even remember calling her mom. But they happen every once in a blue moon, and I’ve never actually had a crazy experience with dreams. But I do daydream a lot and really overthink throughout my day.

Maybe you just think so much that there’s nothing left to dream about.

DT: Yeah that’s the thing, like yesterday I went to bed at 4am because I couldn’t stop thinking. I had to put on Headspace and I tried like four different sleep meditations to try to fall asleep. That rarely happens, but yeah I probably do all of my thinking during the day and during the night it’s actual rest.

This leads into another thing—Dani, I read about how you were interested in comfort as a general theme. Claire, I’ll ask you this first. What’s bringing you comfort right now?

CR: *Raises beer

What’s that? Oh beer, ha.

CR: Honestly, the pandemic has been kind of sick because I’ve been able to communicate with people on the internet a lot more. I’ve always loved the internet ever since I got on Tumblr when I was a kid, but I’ve been interacting with so many more people than I thought I would. Like my friend Sarah Davachi, who’s a composer—

Her work is beautiful.

CR: Yeah, she’s the best. We had a conversation the other day on the phone about how we would have been in the same place—like we would have met in person by now from playing the same show or a festival or touring, but we didn’t because of the pandemic. So everything was initiated by reaching out over social media. And that’s so comforting. Just getting to meet people using the internet in that kind of way.

On that note—do you guys have people in your head that you’ve always wanted to cross paths with in that kind of unplanned way?

CR: It seems kind of gross to plan that.

Well that’s what I’m saying is you don’t plan it. But in your head it’s kind of kicking around.

CR: Well if it’s already in your head then you’re kind of planning it.

Okay fair.

CR: I don’t know, I really like Jennifer Herrema who used to be in Royal Trux. She’s cancelled I guess so I don’t know, but I think she’s a badass.

DT: I would say the first person that came to mind was Betty Woodman, but she died like two years ago. She was a badass ceramicist and painter. Internally I always feel like I’m eighty years old, so I connect the most with older people.

Totally. For me, one of the main takeaways of this whole past year has been realizing the value of spending time with more elderly people.

DT: Oh yeah. One of my best friends—who recently died—I helped him declutter his house throughout my four years of college and we formed this super tight relationship. He taught me so much about life. He was an environmentalist, so he taught me a lot about nature. Recently while I was in Pennsylvania, I drove down to Baltimore to see his family and was so sad that his daughter got rid of everything that he owned, including some extremely rare artifacts. His family had been in Baltimore since the 1600’s—they were some of the first settlers there. But going back to the comfort thing, I recently started swimming again at the YMCA like two blocks from my house, and it’s all older people there. They’re just moving their bodies, doing some aerobics, and they just look at me and smile. That’s comforting, you know?

Yeah, that’s beautiful. Claire, do you have any elderly people in your life right now?

CR: Yeah! I have a bunch of friends who I was actually jamming with earlier today. We’re in a band and they’re all in their mid-50’s and early 60’s. Those are my favorite people to hang out with. We were just playing some tunes, and we’re playing tomorrow too. We’ve just been practicing and having fun, but yeah it’s awesome. And then Ken Vandermark and Joe McPhee and all those kinds of people that do free jazz stuff. It’s been really nice getting to know those people over the last couple years.

Amazing. Has anything else been inspiring you guys?

CR: Yeah, I’ve been watching a ton of movies. Rewatching some stuff that I hadn’t seen in a really long time or that I loved when it came out but never really revisited. Like Green Room—I think that’s a brilliant film. Blue Valentine I just watched for the first time. Ryan Gosling, oh man. That movie is so sad. The Florida Project, that too. My friend Michael Foster is a saxophone player who lives in LA now and is a huge film guy. So is my friend Alex Cunningham who lives in St. Louis, they both send me films all the time. So I just watch what they send me. Oh and I watched DAU, which is like a 30 hour movie where they recreated the Soviet Union.

Whoa.

CR: Yeah, they recreated the Soviet Union for like a decade, and the director made people live there and use all of the old technology and they got everything on film. It’s kind of cheesy sounding, but it’s actually pretty brilliant. You can rent the movies—I think they’re in like twelve parts, and they’re coming out with more.

DT: I want to watch that now.

CR: I got my projector, you should come over.

a softer focus Album art

a softer focus Album art

I feel like that would be a cool thing to just have on in your space, constantly going.

CR: The problem is that none of it’s in English, so it’s hard to have on in the background. And there’s this one part where this girl falls in love with another girl and she’s married, but the girl she falls in love with is in a poly relationship, and basically the second half of the movie is just them fucking, like porn style. I remember just thinking this is exhausting . . . so maybe not the best thing to have on all the time.

DT: I haven’t had time to watch anything lately, but honestly my parents have been inspiring me. They’re in construction, and I’m just seeing what they are able to do and build. I’ve always been drawn to make bigger work, and seeing a house built from the ground up I’m like damn should I be an architect? I want to make some crazy structures. I don’t know, to me, the biggest form of art making would be making spaces you can inhabit, so I’ve been thinking about that lately. I also love tile, so making a space and filling it up with a bunch of handmade tiles—things like that I’ve been thinking of.

 
 

How do you guys feel about San Antonio?

CR: I love San Antonio so much. It’s my favorite place in the world. Just socially I like the way people interact here. It’s pretty relaxed and not professional, which is good for people like me. Everything’s just slower moving, really inexpensive, and people really value hanging out. If I could tour and not actually play shows, I would just do that. The whole reason I want to do art or music or whatever for a living is so I can hang out with more people, because people are ultimately what I’m interested in. I love the people here. I’m also not from here, and I really had to learn a lot about San Antonio when I moved here because I moved from Canada, and the culture is super different. Like I’d never seen any part of Latino culture. But it’s an amazing place, I love it so much.

Dani what’s San Antonio like for you now?

DT: I’ve grown to love it. For so long I rejected it, because I never felt like I was from here since I moved from Mexico when I was ten years old and the Latino culture here is very different than it is in Mexico. So I also had to learn about the people here. I still want to travel and do residencies and stuff, but I want to have a place to come back to, and San Antonio feels like that place for me because it is relaxed, it’s cheap, and this is where my family is. It’s a great place to come back to and relax because there really isn’t much going on unless you look for it.

CR: And you don’t really want to be involved with the scene or whatever here anyways. It’s good to do your own shit.

DT: Right, and like in Baltimore, I lived in this building that was kind of above a highway and it was so noisy. I really value silence, and you get that here—very quiet spaces, and I love that. So yeah, this past year I learned to really appreciate being here.

Going back to this album, do you guys feel like you learned anything about yourselves making it?

DT: Definitely. This was my first collaboration, so I really learned how to work with people that I really like. Also it opened up a huge door for me with design. Even the video that Claire and I made was my first video. I’m someone who loves exploring different mediums—I don’t only like sticking to just painting or ceramics. If the project asks for something else, then I’m going to learn that thing, and this project asked for me to learn how to design an album cover and work digitally, which has inspired more work because now I have this new tool that I can use in the iPad. So it’s definitely been a really great thing for my start of 2021.

What about you Claire?

CR: Yeah, a lot of the same things, like the multidisciplinary kind of flexibility. I was talking with Joe McPhee earlier—I think he’s the best—and his whole thing is being a jack of all trades and master of none. So I started calling myself a professional amateur, because I don’t really care about mastering anything. I don’t really give a shit about the medium or the method or anything. If I can master being Claire, that’s all I care about. You know what I mean?

Hell yeah.

CR: And why wouldn’t you want to know yourself better? Like working on this project with Dani, we were doing shit where we were like, we both don’t know how the fuck to do this.

Which you kind of need right? You kind of always want that, in a way.

CR: Yeah, it rules.
DT: It’s exciting, it really is. For me it’s always been the idea first, then you figure out how to make it. I really don’t like thinking “I don’t know how to do that, so I’m not going to do that.” To me an opportunity is a chance to learn, and this was an opportunity for me to learn to design something and put it out there.

So cool. Can’t wait to see what else you guys make.

 

Connor Dillman.jpg

Connor Dillman is a writer and visual artist based in Los Angeles. He received his BA in English at Emory University and is currently studying Fine Arts at Otis College of Art and Design. He spent a good chunk of his early life on baseball fields around the world, but now he feels most at home by the ocean or on dark dance floors.

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