A few weeks back I saw this interior dashcam video on Instagram reels during a late-night doomscroll where a girl gets into her boyfriend’s car and they have a bit of flirtatious back and forth, and she reaches out to scratch the back of his head whilst he’s driving. Just a sort of innocent moment caught on camera I suppose, but it surprised me not only his immediate (positive) response to the physical touch, but also the reaction it had on me too. A sudden, radical need for oxytocin at whatever time of night it was at that instant, brought on by some random, almost voyeuristic, happenstance viewing.
What is it about touch? Fingers running through your own, down your arms, the nape of your neck, between the shoulders. Inductions not simply of sensation but something more, satisfactions brought up not just because of someone else, but through them also. Even the mere thought, or indeed the seeing of the act on another, seems to stimulate a mirror response within us.
I don’t really think of Rousay’s discography in the sensual exactly, but rather her overall music as reflections of these brief moments of intimacy we experience in the modern world as physical beings. Ambient, certainly at its edges if not at its centre, has definitely been trending in this direction in recent years, atmospheres becoming condensed, moods distilled into essentials; Love in the Time of TikTok. Claire, and by extension, a little death, epitomises the bitesized emotive lives we experience, and perhaps sometimes of a life lived through the lens of social media.
Collaged sounds in motion capture the ever-present busyness of life on flickering “night one”, transmuting into the beatific synthetics of hovering “doubt”, whose scrapes of drone amidst the passing background cars and radio conversations leave us travelling in a blurred reverie with thought elsewhere, rather than with any sort of focus.
The shorter tracks in the first half, “conditional love” and “just”, seem to exist interstitially, bursts of information and emotion flow on terse synth beds: the need for fingers in the hair, the brain-melting emptiness of 10 second insta reels both holding back the want, and exacerbating it. These are momentary flashes; though not lessened by their ephemerality they pass by to leave a lingering sense of needing something more, of yearning.
The final two tracks continue an upward trajectory of length: penultimate “somewhat burdensome” croons in guitar chords and arpeggiated piano fragments towards something brighter. And then it’s on the shoulders of the seminal closer, a tentative jenga tower of violin and clarinet textures ascending, building intimacy into something physical from the incorporeal, of moving action into the real world. Meaning and purpose blooming out of existential emptiness.
There’s a line in Before Sunrise where Julie Delpy says: “I believe if there’s any kind of God it wouldn’t be in any of us, not you, or me, but just this little space in between”. 30 years on I wonder if God might now be the glowing glass of a phone screen that delivers life and love and touch to us, rather than living it. Somehow we’re learning life in reverse.