Undressing the instinct
Clara Engel brings us Secret Beasts (2009) recorded live in just a weekend. Her poetry and her raw voice arouse our nervous system and make us being conscious of each one of our steps. Life beats, fears, loves, wants, hates and doubts her reasons in each song. Her songs are beasts breaking jails.
Who are the secret beasts?
That title comes from a Theodore Roethke poem. He is one of my favourite writers, but my volume of his poetry is packed away in a box right now, so I can’t locate the poem. I believe the line is: “Out, out, you secret beasts, you birds, you western birds.” (I hope I didn’t butcher that). I probably chose that title because it was a relief to release these songs. A lot of them are kind of brutal love-songs, so it was good to set them free to run away like wild animals, and leave me in relative peace to move on to the next chapter.
Break in the sun has an apocalyptic atmosphere in sound and lyrics. I feel like a ghost, rootless desire and dirty clothes...Are you expressing a personal feeling or is it your vision of our time?
Literally speaking, when I wrote that song, I was spending a lot of time travelling on buses alone, headphones on, writing, thinking, and it was a really difficult point in my life. I felt lost in the way that the protagonist of Anna Kavan’s novel “Ice” feels lost. He is searching for a person, and for a feeling, or maybe for a person who (he believes) allows him to feel. The further you get into the novel, the more you get the sense that she no longer exists, or never existed in the way that the protagonist envisions her. The novel takes place during the onset of an ice age, and he is racing against a world that is rapidly shutting down and becoming very difficult to navigate, less and less conducive to life. It is kind of exhausting to read. It reminds me of Secret Beasts though. I actually had to put that book down and take a break, I’m still halfway through it, and it’s also packed away in a box. I read that it was largely inspired by addiction, and I think the obsessive quest for any euphoria is a form of addiction. I don’t have a distinct vision of our time, I see things in a more fragmented way.
Ghost opera is deeply painful. Your voice is literally crying for faithful lies asking them to keep love alive. Faith, lies, love, money, patria, etc. Do you think we’ve transformed life in a lie?
I don’t believe in a singular ‘we’, and I can only speak for myself. I don’t think it’s possible to transform life into a lie. Life is huge, much bigger than anyone could ever fathom, which is both comforting and terrifying. Lies are stories that we make up, they’re tiny, even big lies are tiny in a sense. We have a lot less control over our lives than we pretend to have, and there are many institutions and conventions in place trying to placate us and distract us from this. Violent storms, illness, death, these are ancient monsters that we will always have to face, and however much one lies to oneself or to others, those monsters will always be lurking, and they cannot be framed or contextualized away. I like singers that acknowledge terror, and sing for their lives, writers that write for their lives, like a swimmer swims to keep from drowning, out of necessity. Maybe Ghost Opera is partly about disintegration – everything is shaking and falling down, and asking for an “I love you” is like asking for this tired cliché to anchor you.
The beauty of your design is a perfect title for a society in which there’s nothing but image. Has The Picture of Dorian Gray of Oscar Wilde become a prophecy?
I’ve actually never read Oscar Wilde. I would say Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, and the film Blade Runner were greater influences as far as that song is concerned. I’m fascinated by the idea of human-playing-god, and also by ideas of control and power in interpersonal relationships. I hear that song as being occupied with mortality, fragility of form, human attachment. It could also be a love song from Frankenstein to his monster. I like to keep it open. I don’t have distinct or static notions of what my songs are about.
The one that cuts my roses down is the one that I'm loving. Where’s the boundary between love and addiction?
I doubt that there is one universal boundary, I think most human states are murky, and overlap a lot. I guess something becomes seriously addictive when you need it in order to ‘just be’ and when it eclipses your faculties of reason. That line to me has to do with power and control, where one person has the power to give and to take away the happiness of an other - which seems to be a common situation, or something most of us can relate to… for e.g. the lyrics to that classic song “You are My Sunshine.”
Why Old fashioned love has a more hopeful air?
I just wrote a sweet love song, and I don’t like my albums to be too governed by any single aesthetic, so I didn’t want to edit it out just because it’s a bit of a non-sequitur. I like sweet love songs, and it was a real joy to sing with Tomathy Daly Chandler – he is an amazing singer and experimental folk artist from the UK. (http://tsinderash.bandcamp.com)
An angel from Madagascar brings the idea of a painful love again. What need is bigger, desire or feeling desired?
It depends on your character, probably. Measuring emotional need is impossible. I think that song is life-embracing and playful in a ‘bring it on’ kind of way. Pain is unavoidable, I think it’s ultimately more devastating to try too hard to avoid it.
Your album has a raw sound and your voice sounds completely naked giving us a desperate feeling. Is it hard to sing these songs live?
No, I love singing live. But yes, I don’t like singing these songs over and over, or spending too much time with any of my past work. I get tired of my songs quickly, it can be difficult for the people I play with sometimes. My live shows are living, changing things, and I always play plenty of new songs. It’s not emotionally hard for me to sing live though, unless I am having a really horrible day, and then everything is harder, right? Performing is very freeing, and also demands a lot of concentration. I have to be wholly present, and so I can’t be reliving any single painful experience when I sing, I live something new each time I perform.
My words are stones cast into the sea. Are we prisoners of words?
Obviously, I love words and I spend a lot of time with them. But I also recognize that words are often impotent. There is no magic combination of words that will, on their own, create a channel of communication. Communication is reciprocal, and no matter how compelling, clear, or beautiful a song, poem, or love letter is, if someone is not receptive to it, they will not hear it.
Parents and sons, lovers, friends... Every relationship has always an end. Does a breakup mean a closed or an open door?
I don’t know. It would depend on the situation and the people I guess, I have a lot less answers and more questions about all these things. I tend to shut doors and open them again… and shut them again..and open them… etc. I struggle with those things as much as the next person, maybe more. My music is full of questions, but I don’t know if I have a single answer in there.
I want to crawl back to the ocean for you...if my losing delights you, if my losing excites you. Do we only exist if someone else pays attention to us?
Well, it’s possible to belittle someone and make them feel unseen or unheard, if that’s what you mean, sure. But to me, that line is funny. There’s so many love songs where someone will do such-and-such for the other, and that song is saying: I’ll devolve for you, I’ll lose my limbs and my lungs, I’ll turn back into a fish for you! That is romantic.
Protect me from all my desire, numb me to the one I love. Are we able to live?
I guess sometimes we are and sometimes we aren’t, if ‘live’ is defined less literally, and can speak to feeling things deeply, going through various hells, not hiding from parts of life and painful experiences. I hesitate to explain my lyrics, I write them from a place in myself that is far removed from the place that I am thinking from right now. These answers feel sort of like a stranger’s voice-over commentary in another language. I hear that song as an expression of the desire to find sanctuary away from feeling and emotional upheaval for a while. That’s probably what a ‘death-wish’ often is, more of a desire for space away from pain and upheaval than a literal desire to die. To sing openly about that kind of a death-wish is life-embracing in my mind; being able to connect and communicate about an isolating experience is a way of breaking out of isolation.
It makes me a bit nervous to analyze my songs. But it’s comforting that I feel at a loss while I’m doing it, it means I am unable to explain them. I don’t want to make work that I can explain.
She’s completely right. The best thing we can do is to listen to her voice expressing songs that can take us to the depth of her enormous poetic talent.
Interview by Juan Carlos Romero
Photo courtesy of Clara Engel