Giramata - Auclair - April 2022
AS008
Written/recorded/produced: Auclair
Final mix/additional production: Kwes
Mastering: Katie Tavini
Videos/Artwork/Press Shots by Dark Angel Services
D.A.A.R.L.
Them Unsaids
Doggo
Sinti Holo
Blank Spaces
On her new EP Giramata, Auclair explores themes of transmutation, each song opens up a space for things to change from one state to another - a process that’s brought to life in the raw and sinuous energy of her voice, layers of warping synths and the tactile immediacy of drum hits. Here the spaces left by ghost notes are given as much weight as the ones charged up with bold polyrhythms.
Growing up in West London, the British-Rwandan music and sound artist flourished under the influences of its eclectic broken beat, techno, drum & bass and jungle scenes. Teamed with her love of punk and hardcore bands, and her background in choirs, Auclair soon started to craft a liminal space, where digital and analog amalgamate to form something interchangeable, and forever evolving. Purchasing her first eight-track, the artist recorded with whatever she had, building universes out of herself by using her vocals as an instrument, adding layers and field recordings to create a transcendent, intricate beauty.Auclair has always been inquisitive about the musicality of sound, and has spent much of her time between records focusing on sound art projects and multi-arts collaborations. Previous projects include a live reworking and scoring of Afro-Brazilian classic Black Orpheus with Charlie Dark; Beck’s Song Reader Live; a multi-sensory concert for a blindfolded audience The Sensory Score; choral sound work about bees The Swarm and a musique concrete series made from recordings of buildings.
She’s played in samba groups, trained with a Nigerian master drummer and studied with the pioneering Rwandan drum ensemble Ingoma Nshya. It’s this rhythmic language of her heritage and her growing musical curiosity that produces an unwavering thread throughout Giramata, where Auclair uses her body, her voice, drum machines, scrunched up plastic bags and shells, and synthesisers to set out on a kaleidoscopic, cathartic wandering.
This ever-bending energy opens with “D.I.A.A.R.L. (Dreaming Is An Act of Radical Love)” – a serenade to the power of our dreams as a liberation practice, inspired by Rwandan drumming, Sun Ra and bell hooks.
Later on the Audre Lorde-inspired “Them Unsaids,” the angular shifting drums and thick bass pop and lock under vocals striving to turn silence into language and action, while on “Doggo” woozy 90s trance chords and messy blown-out drums carry us through an awakening to the ways thirst can express itself.
After improvising with EDP’s WASP synth, Auclair created “Sinti Holo,” it’s sliding touch-sensitive keypad providing the wavey backdrop for a homage to how swimming helped mend a broken heart.
Closer “Blank Spaces” sound of a train points towards a journey yet to end, and reason being redundant under the ever-collapsing phrase: “All those blank spaces / giving me aching / to chase it / more.
Giramata is an EP that sees Auclair stretch her creative muscles to push through the barriers of self scrutiny, heartache and longing, shifting sounds to form a mythological pathway into something transcendental yet everyday. Like the saturated colours of Wong Kar Wai, the circular narratives of Pedro Almodovar, or the rich, captivating traditions of Rwandan folklore, Auclair seeks out the beauty in the small details. It’s a series of transformations, and encountering yourself with fresh eyes; it’s making peace with grief and ritual desire; it’s expressing vulnerability in an unadorned, open space.