Clara Engel Interview: “My practice is my life’s work”

2020 will go down in history for obvious reasons, but trying to extract some positives from one of the tumultuous years of our generation, in our own little patch of Internet land we started these humble pages.

There was no mission statement, but one of the unspoken rules was to find new artists and, of course, write about them. Almost four years on, and I’d like to think that we continue to unearth new artists for readers to discover.

One of the first who was new to our ears was Clara Engel. On the back of their late 2020 release, A New Skin, from the first note I just knew that the Toronto artist would become a vital part of the tapestry.

Following A New Skin, they have gone on to release an album every year: the underrated 2021 offering, Dressed in Borrowed Light; last year’s epic Their Invisible Hands and Engel’s debut for Tyneside label, Cruel Nature Records. Midway through last month, they followed it up for their second CN release, Sanguinaria.

With the likes of Sing In Our Chains, The Snake in the Mirror and album centre-pieces Deathless and I Died Again, Engel carves out a series of songs that are hauntingly abstract, slowly seeping into the pores.

Also introducing subtle new elements of lap steel to their dream-like sonics (Sing In Our Chains, A Silver Thread), Sanguinaria is another fine chapter in this story, and one that is not dissimilar to the notions spoken about last week in relation to Protomartyr: Engel’s music isn’t a case-by-case proposition. It needs to be treated holistically as one swirling document.

Just after the release of, Sanguinaria, Engel answered some our questions about Sanguinaria, along with their process, influences and more.

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Sun 13: Can you tell us the ideas behind the making of the Sanguinaria?

Clara Engel: “I started writing this album when bloodroot was blooming near my home. Bloodroot is a spring ephemeral, and its Latin name is ‘sanguinaria canadensis’, hence the title. As I was working on these songs, I was reading Different by Frans De Waal and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. I was also watching the show Russian Doll. Some themes that found their way into the album, (but that preoccupy me always), are the depth and mystery of animal intelligence, the shortcomings of human intelligence, death, life cycles, and impermanence.”

S13: What was the main thing you wanted to capture with the record?

CE: “In a basic sense, probably the same thing I am always trying to capture: a recorded rendition of my work that still feels somewhat raw and spontaneous. I used a ribbon microphone to record all the vocals and many of the instruments, so it’s another dark and murky sounding record. A lot of music coming out these days sounds overly bright and loud to my ears, and I think I’m responding by going darker and quieter… eventually you won’t be able to hear it at all. I’m kidding. (I hope!)”

S13: The artwork to Sanguinaria and last year’s Their Invisible Hands are quite similar in aesthetic which got me thinking; do you consider the two albums linked in any way?

CE: “All my albums are linked – I’m always working on new songs, so each album flows into the next, and change happens incrementally, on its own timeline. Both of these albums are maybe more deeply rooted in the natural world, because that’s become a bigger part of my life in the past few years. Their Invisible Hands’ cover art features a photo from my childhood, and Sanguinaria has a photo of a wild hare that I encountered last summer. So one is tinged with nostalgia and I don’t remember it being taken, and the other one I took myself at the same time as I was working on the album, and I vividly remember the moment I took it. They do echo each other visually, but that was sort of accidental.”

S13: This is your second record for Cruel Nature. How did the collaboration with the label come about?

CE: “I wrote to Steve Strode who runs Cruel Nature Records and he liked my music. It’s really nice when that happens; so often I feel like I’m blasting my work into the ether. It’s been a pleasure to work with him, and I love how varied the Cruel Nature catalogue is. I also like their name.”

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S13: Deathless and I Died Again are back-to-back on the album, which forms an interesting juxtaposition. Were these two written close together?

CE: “I wrote I Died Again first, and it came together faster. Deathless has more dense instrumentation, and my friend Paul Kolinski plays bass drum, banjo, and sings with me on that track. I thought that the juxtaposition of titles was amusing. I learned that in Mandarin the word for death and the word for the number four sound really similar, so the number four is considered an unlucky number. That’s why I made Deathless track number four. Then I thought it would be fun to follow it with I Died Again.

“There’s a Russian mythological figure called Koschei the Deathless, and my partner told me a fairy tale by that name when we first met. The story itself has evaporated from my memory but the word ‘deathless’ stayed with me, and it fits this song. I wrote I Died Again after watching the show Russian Doll and the film Nightmare Alley (the original 1947 version, not the remake). It has a vaguely klezmer-ish thing going on with the melodica. My dad was Jewish and he died six years ago. Since then I’ve been delving deeper into the music.”

S13: Larvae is such a lovely way to end the album, too. Did you sense that it would be the closing track when you wrote it?

CE: “Thank you. At one point I wasn’t sure if that song would fit on the album. Then it became clear that if it stayed, it would be the closer. I wrote Larvae after reading an article that really depressed me about the possibility of growing crops in moon dust. I was thinking about all the money and resources that get funnelled into these far-flung maniacal human schemes, and of all the environmental carnage and neglect that we inflict on our only home (like the impending destruction of the Greenbelt in Ontario, where I live).”

S13: There’s a nice introduction of lap steel on the record, too. How far into the process did you decide to incorporate this into the songs?

CE: “The lap steel star of the album is Lys Guillorn – they make a guest appearance on A Silver Thread. I play slide sometimes, which could perhaps be mistaken for lap steel, but it’s a totally different beast. Brad Deschamps plays some lap steel on the record too, but you wouldn’t recognise it as lap steel – more of an ethereal ambience. Lys has played lap steel on a bunch of my albums now, starting with Hatching Under the Stars in 2020. I love a lot of old country music, and that sound is so associated with it, but my music is decidedly not country. I kind of like the word ‘genrequeer’ for that reason, I can embrace and enjoy aspects of many musical styles without neatly fitting into any of them. I knew pretty early on in the recording process that A Silver Thread would sound great with Lys’ style of lap steel.”

S13: Mixing and recording records yourself, how difficult is it to let go and be content with the final result?

CE: “Very difficult. This record was a tough one. I almost lost my mind in the mixing phase, but here I am to tell the tale. I have no formal training in recording – the pandemic was the impetus to start learning how to do it in a way that did my songs justice. Now that I have the gear and the experience gained from fumbling my way forward, it is much more affordable do it all myself (at the expense of my own sanity sometimes). Next time around I’ve decided to try making an album of one-mic-recordings, voice and acoustic guitar, with very minimal overdubs. But to be honest I rarely stick to my plans though, so that’s more of an aspiration. What I’m saying is: my dream is to have ever fewer variables to work with. In terms of contentment, I’m rarely content. Each album helps me figure out what I want to do differently next time.”

S13: Are you constantly looking for ideas? Do you have a routine for writing songs every day?

CE: “I think I’m just oriented in the world in such a way that I make things. I’m always working on something, whether it’s visual art or music. Not being creative gives me existential malaise. Sometimes I do have to devote a considerable amount of energy to other aspects of the work, like press, marketing, and trying to get airplay, and that can be time-consuming. I fall in an out of having a routine, but I prefer to have one, even if it’s tenuous. For me, whatever I’m working on, getting outside somewhere green early in the day really helps me to function as an artist and a person, so I have worked to build that into my life. That is even more important for my practice than whether or not I write every day.”

S13: When entering the creative process, do you think certain aspects are taken out of your hands?

CE: “I’m not sure I ever fully exit the creative process – or that I have much control over it when I’m really deep in it. It’s all out of my hands when it’s really flowing. Intentions and control are flimsy things. I just focus on the practice.”

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S13: Given that you’ve released a new album every year for the last four years, how do you feel after an album is released? Is it straight onto the next one?

CE: “I feel depressed right after I finish an album. There’s an intense period of time right before the actual release when my main work is sending it out to people who write about music, which is a grind, (I’m talking 400-600 emails or so), and demoralising at times when people are dismissive or there is just no response. A big thing I have learned and that I feel compelled to share is that hype is almost never organic – with the way the music world is now, there’s a lot of invisible work behind getting a new release to cut through the noise, even a little bit. It’s not romantic or seamless at all. The nice thing about doing so much myself is I’ve met some really good people who run labels and radio shows, and who write about music.

“The act of making music and art is the one part of this that I love unequivocally. It’s an ongoing process, there is no beginning or end, and my practice is my life’s work, not a project-to-project endeavour.”

S13: With art continuing to be swallowed up by capitalism just how important has a platform such as Bandcamp been for artists such as yourself who have a clear vision to stay off the likes of streaming services like Spotify?

CE: “Bandcamp is wonderful, and it would be great if there were more artist-centric platforms out there. I’m not sure how clear my vision is. As an experiment last year, I signed up for digital distribution and put my music on AppleMusic, Amazon, and Youtube, is that any better than Spotify? Likely not. In over a year and a half I think I’ve made around thirty dollars from all streaming services combined. Lately I’ve been considering only using Tidal and Napster (the ones who compensate artists a little better) and maybe AppleMusic, just so that I’m on one of the big cheese streamers.

“I have no answers, I think the whole streaming model has cheapened music and the people who make it to a really disturbing degree. There’s a lot of social pressure on artists just to ‘be cool’ with whatever absurdly crappy work conditions we are handed. I think I’m just open about not being cool with it, but I don’t have any great solution or insight to share.”

Sanguinaria is out now via Cruel Nature Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.