Words-Art Jefferson
Images-Emma-Lee, Yuki Komura, Clara Engel
Clara Engel is an artist but not in the cliché way that you hear the word continuously thrown around. Her art reflects passion and that passion…just is. At times it seems as if she is happy to be free of the questioning. Engel’s song writing is poetic and vibrant with lyrics that could stand alone like a classic novel. Her vocals clutches emotions with a firm grip allowing a moody musical palette to sometimes evoke a beautiful sadness and other times a fierce optimism yet, the idea of complexities would only matter if she dwelt on it. Her art…is simply that glorious space. Based in Toronto, the multi-instrumentalist has released nine records, “The Lovebird’s Throat” being the latest and like a true and natural artist, Clara Engel is uncompromising when it comes to the freedom of expressing herself and the creation of her work. It is that kind of strength and courage that makes her art inspirational and accomplishes what it is meant to do…touch.
AJ-For starters, your voice is so amazingly unique. Walk me through your musical history.
CE-Thank you for saying that. I’m self-taught as a singer, and calling myself a singer feels misleading, even though it’s technically the case. I’m some sort of artist who works in the song medium… I don’t sing every day, but I work on my songs in some capacity every day. A lot of my writing process happens on paper and in my head. I wrote poetry before I wrote songs. My mother used to read poetry with me from when I was very young until I was a young teenager, and I think my favourite poets have probably informed my songwriting as much as my music listening has. To name a few: Vasko Popa, Paul Celan, Theodore Roethke, Essex Hemphill, Stevie Smith, Edgar Allan Poe and Helene Cixous (whose doesn’t write poetry really, but I read her writing as poetry). If I am really honest about what I think I do – I make little worlds that I then open up to others to explore. I think of a lot of artists could be described as world-makers. And the act of singing live makes me feel completely outside myself, an intoxicating sense of void (where) I don’t think about anything. I started singing and writing my own songs when I was thirteen. The first songwriters whose work I fell in love with and emulated kind of contradict each other in terms of form – Bob Dylan and Kurt Cobain. Later I discovered CAN, Patti Smith, Captain Beefheart, Jacques Brel, Robert Johnson, Harry Smith’s Folk Anthology, all the early Yazoo Records releases I could find and more. I really immersed myself. I was insecure about my voice for a long time. I failed singing in school repeatedly as a kid – I was very anxious and nervous, and we were tested in front of the class – my voice just wouldn’t come out of my body. I kind of croaked a little and then would be told to sit down. I think failure of some sort is an experience that is ultimately freeing though, because you are freed from others’ expectations of you. So, in a way, I’m grateful for my early taste of failure. I learned how to open my voice, a weird morphing moment, when I was 20 or 21, after I heard Antony Hegarty and Diamanda Galas, it was a revelation about what singing could be and what music could do. I realized that I actually had a different kind of voice than I thought I had. But I’m not interested in being a virtuoso vocalist. I am mostly interested in going deeper and going more places with my songs – keeping the whole song in mind is really important to me, the poetic principle.
AJ-Tell me about the role of visual arts and how it is intertwined with your work because from the album packaging to your presentation, I get the sense that you do have a strong understanding of the medium as a whole.
CE-My appreciation of visual art is uninformed. I know a lot more about music, or rather, I can identify a lot more of it. I do have strong ideas of what I like visually though, for instance I love German Expressionist woodcuts, and black and white portrait photography with a lot of attention to light and shadow. I can spend ages looking at that stuff. I also love to draw. I mostly draw faces because they fascinate me.
AJ-Your music could be described as modern folk but I feel that this description doesn’t do it pure justice because listening to a recording such as “Secret Beasts”, there is a sort of gothic/chamber element in there as well, in my opinion. How would you describe it?
CE-I would avoid it. Pretty recently, before one of my shows, as I was trying (and doing a horrible job) of describing it to someone who asked me that question, a friend who was sitting next to me stepped in and said “heartbreaking” – now that’s the kind of thing that one does not say about one’s own work because it makes you sound arrogant. But I was pleased with her intervention and description. I would prefer if it hit people at an emotional level before any kind of genre-evaluation-wheels start turning in their heads. I’m listening to Jewish Cantorial music lately and I feel like there’s something so direct about how moving the vocal delivery is, it just goes for the gut and spirit and is immediately moving. I give up on genre. I don’t think about genre when I’m writing or even listening to music. I’m interested in what moves me and I paint surreal pictures and stories with words and music.
AJ-As you know, music is heavily electronic based these days. Yet your sound is organic in terms of instrumentation. There are guitars, a piano, percussion, vibraphones and even bassoon playing in some tracks. However, your voice is one that I feel electronic producers would go nuts over because it would fit brilliantly over certain tracks. What’s your take on music currently?
CE-I have a fear of being used as somebody’s instrument. I am also extremely wary of producers. There’s a heavy trope in music, of mastermind-man-guiding-female-vocalist as a splash of colour in their palette. I’ve been approached a few times, (sometimes in much nicer ways than others), and I refuse to partake. My voice is one element of my work, albeit a huge element, but as I said before, to me, it’s more of a world-making process. It is multi-faceted and draws from everything I see, feel, hear, read, experience, imagine; My world-filter, basically. Part of the reason that my music sounds so unpolished and naked compared to a lot of what you hear is that I’m not really a perfectionist. Pretty shortly after we first met, my partner lent me a book about the Wabi-sabi aesthetic or sensibility. It resonated deeply, and continues to resonate, with what I find beautiful. I won’t go into depth about it, because I couldn’t do it justice but, seeing beauty in imperfection and accepting transience are a big part of it. Also, leaving traces of the process, the smudge-mark of the fingertip, the break in the voice, not airbrushing the blemishes and cracks out of everything-I love that. I find it more moving and human than the glossiness of so much of what we see and hear and aspire to so often these days. I would rather never “make it” than lose my enjoyment or the full-bodied feeling of what I’m doing. I don’t fit into any scene that I’ve encountered yet, and frankly, I’m less and less bothered by that.
AJ-Tell me about your latest release “The Lovebird’s Throat”. To me it’s like a sonic storybook and dream. It’s quite vivid.
CE-Thank you! It was recorded in one day, in Gloucester MA, with Tony Goddess engineering. Nate Greenslit (Bury Me Standing, HUMANWINE, What Time is it Mister Fox?) plays drums. I wanted to record as much as I could in one day and it turned out unexpectedly well. I added a whole bunch of other sonic textures back in Toronto, with Mitchell Girio-I’ve recorded with him on numerous occasions. I like both the storybook and the dream description. In a way that’s how I want people to experience all of my albums. “Disembody My Voice” was inspired largely by “The Little Mermaid” by Hans Christian Andersen. I tried, in my way, to capture some of the feeling of the original, including the sense of transformation, and a way of reaching beyond what can be grasped. “Not Knowing” was a really simple song written with some real people in mind. But it also makes me think of “Into the Wild” by Jon Krakauer. Most of the time I don’t figure out what my songs are about until after I write them and sometimes I’m surprised or alarmed when I do.
AJ-Finally, you mention that the tracks on “The Bethlehem Tapes” were not meant to be an album but were spawned from various situations. What are some your personal inspirations when creating music and art?
CE-I don’t know if I’m ever inspired but I write a lot. I think the practice of writing songs, the work in itself, is more important than inspiration. It’s like you’re rowing a boat and most of the time it’s really hard work but then, for fleeting moments the current is on your side and you are gliding and it feels as though it will keep going forever. But, then you find yourself battling some gnarly resistance again. That’s pretty much how it is for me. My work is to keep writing and to stay receptive to what I see and hear but a lot of it is just about doing…staying in motion. I like to go out to shows and performances, but a lot of the time I can’t afford to. My imagination, my library card, and my capacity to blow things out of proportion and see the sinister and surreal in a lot of unexpected places serves me very well in terms of finding things to write about.