Clair - Earth Mothers (Hot Gem)

WHAT YOUR EARS SAY & THE COVER LOOKS LIKE

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WHAT WE SAY

​Welcome to Clair's world which is as weird & wonderful as the cover suggests. Life's surface noise, classical concertos, the sounds of sex toys & blow torches, given sounds from friends, snippets of exotic instruments, an ecclesiastical vs the occult soundclash & spectral vocals mix, mingle, mutate & multiply in this obviously magically constructed sound collage. Nothing is whole but trust me this avant-garde New Age neoclassical ambient odyssey is very complete.

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WHAT THE RELEASE NOTES SAY:

Clair is that extraordinary thing: a musical artist that arrives not only fully formed, but with a completely mature sound. Her Earth Mother may be a debut album, but its genesis takes in decades of life and musical experience, including right at the heart of Glasgow’s unique music scene. 

The record music comes from a place of healing through nature – using magick, field recordings, experimenting with instruments she picked up from travelling and in charity shops, as well as random objects ranging from sex toys to a mini sewing machine to jewellery tools, even a blow torch. At points, you might think it falls somewhere in between ambient, neo-classical and folk but with the odd nugget of – as Clair puts it in true Glaswegian form – “ecto hit euphoria”. You might hear hints of Terry Riley or Japanese new age or other hip reference points but really, truly it’s not about references: it exists in a space that’s all its own. This is one woman’s vision coming through loud and clear. 

This is what a life of total immersion in music does to a person. From Guns’n’Roses and rave tapes in the car as a wayward kid, to raving at Slam and Optimo and Glasgow’s notorious after-hours house parties, to promoting her own shows and running her own label, Clair’s absorbed it all. She might have only started making music in 2019 for her own therapeutic purposes, and taking it seriously in 2020 as a way of staying on a level in lockdown – but without knowing it she was spending thousands of hours preparing. This rich, beautiful record is a summation of the light and dark, the instinctive and the well-schooled, the rough and the smoothed of a life well lived... and it’s only just the start.​