CLAIR - Body Blossom (HotGem)

Glasgow new wave of avant-garde artist CLAIR builds on the promise of her debut album with a submersive and ecstatic digital single

CLAIR’s debut album Earth Mothers landed like a comet last year, alien-seeming against its musical surroundings. The Glasgow artist otherwise known as Clair Crawford takes inspiration from the inclusivity and without-boundaries music at Optimo’s legendary weekly party that she frequented in the early 2000s – and it shows. Glasgow has a storied history of outsider voices making thrilling art, unconcerned with how it should be done and all the better for it. Here is an artist who is shaping up to be another vital figure in that beautiful untradition.

CLAIR has further focused her sound on digital single “Body Blossom”, upping the emotional stakes while thankfully keeping the occult edges, proving once again that she is attuned to certain cosmic channels. The cinematic quality hinted at on last year’s “Tiger Queen” gains depth of field here, suggesting narrative paths that might be taken. She communicates more in three minutes than many artists would dare on an album and listening is a singular experience that cannot simply be switched off afterwards. Vibrations – sonic or otherwise – linger as mild flashbacks.

This is a genuinely moving piece that cuts through emotional barriers with ease, inviting itself into your heart. If that were all then it would already be something special, but the track is as intricate as a music box. It unfolds as the sonic equivalent of time-lapse photography, the listener experiencing this as they travel an interstellar elevator at snail’s pace, into the unknown. Field recordings from the Yukatan jungle (courtesy of San Francisco based filmographer and fellow Optimo attendee Andy MacLennan) are submerged in an oddball neoclassical suite of glacial strings, inner space keys and ethereal voice, evoking the geodesic domes of Silent Running and their last hope for humankind. An ecstatic celebration of Mother Nature as opposed to tropical rainforest streaming playlist for corporate wellbeing then. This is the real thing.

“Body Blossom” floats somewhere along ley lines where Virginia Astley’s From Gardens Where We Feel Secure intersects Shane Carruth’s score for his weirdo SF film Upstream Color and might just be the perfect soundtrack for David Attenborough as he microdoses mushrooms.