Glaswegian sound artist, and sometime silversmith, CLAIR hosts a monthly show on Listen.camp entitled The Sonic Book Club. During these broadcasts CLAIR invites guests from the worlds of literature and music – often people occupying the place where the two overlap – to read while she creates an accompanying soundtrack. People are usually asked to recite from their own work, and CLAIR processes the voices, mixing in field recordings, live modulations, and the odd  appropriate record. 

Clair`s latest album, Sonic Shorts 1.0, her second full-length work to date, uses these archived shows as its raw material to create a musical suite that’s even further out. It`s a whirlpool of words, from writers and authors such as Richard Cabut and Ali Millar, reimagined as whispered witchy incantations. Not always intelligible, now more like instruments, their meaning, their content is instead used to inspire each piece’s musical tone. For example, surf washes Adele Bertei performing a poetic piece from her book, Twist – An American girl, while storms rumble, brew, in the distance. John Robb’s extract from his The History Of Goth. The Art Of Darkness is suitably sinister and industrial. An illbient collision of crashing and mechanical screaming that`d make a perfect post-classical score for a contemporary production of Shakespeare`s The Tempest. 

Dancing, prancing FM synthesis pulses propel Joe Mugford’s scientific soliloquy – constructed from an extended WIRE review / essay – through an ocean of vinyl crackle and static, while effects whistle like passing comets. A woozy symphony of looped muted strings, found fauna helps bring a snippet from Luke Turner’s Out Of The Woods to life. Clair`s palette draws on new age drones, hushed choral harmonies, music box chimes, and phantom fanfares. All existing in an expanse of echo. Otherworldly, enchanted and ethereal, in Clair`s own words the set is both “haunting and haunted”. There are spooky mantras while Cally is a spiral of melodically morphing acoustic picking. Jude Rogers’ reading from her brilliant book, The Sound of Being Human, however, is perhaps the album`s epic highlight.

Sonic Shorts 1.0 can be purchased from HotGem.

Sonic Shorts 2.0, featuring Mogawi`s Stuart Braithwaite, Harold Heath, Richard Norris, and Harry Sword, is due later this year.