claire rousay & Jacob Wick anything you can do...

claire rousay and Jacob Wick met in 2017, in the backyard of a bar in San Antonio. Jacob Wick says:

We went on a west coast tour together the next year, having never played together or spent more than 12 hours together. We never talked about it, we just did it.

It's similar when we play together. We just do it. We set limits but don't really talk about them. For our first tour, claire ditched the cymbals of her drumset. A few years later, she had pretty much ditched the drumset. After years of avoiding playing melodies, stubbornly and obsessively, I now play them, stubbornly and obsessively.

We play trashy music I think. Improvised music, free jazz, whatever, is usually very serious. Very abstract expressionism. Lots of free jazz musicians still love to visit Jackson Pollock at the MoMA in New York and make a post to Instagram. I don't think that's what we're after. We're more into being sad, being funny, being frustrated, being sentimental. People used to go to jazz shows and get drunk, cry, dance, fuck. They still should. Not that we're playing jazz (maybe I am).

We recorded this duo at claire's house in San Antonio in June 2021. The Omicron wave - or was it Delta? - was raging through Texas at that time. We kept getting text messages about hospitals being full of unvaccinated people. I thought of my brother, in Dallas, who says he'll get vaccinated "after everybody else." We recorded and then listened and claire was like, what if we split this in half and overlay the second half on the first half. That's what we did, and it worked.

released December 16, 2022

Recorded and mixed by claire rousay in San Antonio.

Mastered by Andrew Weathers.

art credits:
Magali Lara
Loose sheets for a book
N/D
China ink on cotton paper
21.5 x 16.5 cm