TARA CLERKIN TRIO RIDIAN

Tara Clerkin Trio’s wild experimentation, drawing from acid-jazz, minimalism and psych-pop, has resulted in some of Bristol’s most extraordinary recent releases: from their uncategorisable selftitled debut album to the longform piece ‘Exquisite Corpse I’ How did this project come into being, and how do you see it as relating to the off-kilter folk of Tara’s earlier solo album Hello?

We’re sort of a ‘family band’, so it came about naturally – we all wanted to make music, and we were already a unit. We used to collaborate with a lot of different friends back in the day and folk/psych is where we started. It was a pretty good jumping off point to the world of D.I.Y music, as a lot of these garage revival bands operated in that way and had that sound and spirit. In terms of the time, it also coincided with the internet becoming a major force for change in music: the way it’s made and distributed, at home on a laptop then put it up one Soundcloud or whatever. It made it feel more democratised and achievable. The same forces were at play in electronic music at the time too, which we were all also very engaged with. Without that foundation of experimentation and D.I.Y ethic, we wouldn’t be in a band now for sure.

Your work makes interesting uses of vocal manipulation, from the swelling loops in ‘What’ from your debut album to the pitch shifts on In Spring’s title track. What role do you see the voice as playing in your music (which is far more instrumentally driven than Tara’s solo work), and what draws you to these vocal experiments?

The voice is a tricky one, because it’s an instrument but it’s also very personal. It’s a thing you can make sound with, like a trumpet, but it’s a part of you and you can’t really change it aside from smoking or perhaps screaming a lot. When you hear a recording of yourself talking, the most common reaction tends to be “Who’s that dork? Does my voice really sound like that?”: it can be hard to utilise in a way that feels comfortable. I think pitch shifting, sampling and heavy auto-tuning techniques – which are very popular these days – are all ways of dissociating from your voice, and treating it more like an instrument.

ACID JAZZ / PSYCH-POP / ELECTRONICA

Your EP In Spring was far more vocally led and instrumentally sparse than your debut album, making particularly heavy use of piano. What inspired this shift in your sound between the album and EP?

That was the classic Covid release: feeling melancholic and introspective, without having access to a drum kit. We made that one mainly at home on computers and not together in the practice room or at gigs. Although we did get let into a theatre at one point to record a bunch of improvised stuff on a piano, and the cutting and chopping and looping of those recordings was a starting point for a couple of the songs on it.

Lyrically, your album and EP are both highly abstract. What do you see them as dealing with thematically, and how do you think this abstract style serves this?

How you say something depends a lot on what you’re trying to say. Sometimes the most direct route is the best one, if a theme or message is clear and you can just say it outright. Abstraction can be useful when the ideas expressed are more abstract. If you’re not delivering an absolute truth or idea then you can try to express it by invoking things which relate to it, and which others can relate to through those invocations. It’s different for each person because our minds work differently and our experiences are different, but what different words, concepts, ideas, feelings etc. can invoke –and the interactions between them when they’re combined – can create very intense personal reactions. It can never be totally controlled or formulaic, but this way you can try to express things which might feel beyond words.

The title of ‘Exquisite Corpse I’ appears to refer to a surrealist art technique in which several collaborators add to a piece in sequence Is that how you approached this track’s composition, and – if so – what do you consider the effect of this technique?

That song is basically six sections: we did two rounds each, and each one is made solely by one of us. We sent a snippet (generally the last few seconds of our section) to the next person, who then used that as the jump-off point to make their bit. It was very fun to do: it felt like a game, and it was exciting to see what came out of it at the end.

Tara and Sunny have been collaborating under various guises since the early 2010s, from your membership to the Belvoir House Band to your 2015 Staycation EP. How do you think your history of collaborating has shaped you both artistically?

We’ve been in each other’s lives for a long time, and we’ve been partners for nearly 10 years. Music has always been a huge part of our relationship (both listening to and making it), so it’s really hard to imagine what we’d do, what we’d be into and what we’d make without each other. It’s good. We inspire each other, and have very different ways of thinking, so we usually come at things from very different angles which often leads to surprising results

With your members having been involved so heavily in Bristol’s music for so long, how do you think the city’s musical landscape has changed over time?

Tastes change constantly and quickly thanks to the internet, but there’s definitely a geography to it too. From doing more touring, we’ve definitely seen how musical tastes and styles can be different in different regions. In fact, to us it seems more pronounced in the UK than any of the countries in Europe we’ve played in.

So, possibly more interesting than how the city’s music has changed is what similarities have remained? It’s interesting observing Bristol’s musical heritage, and tracing threads through from 70’s and 80’s post punk (The Pop Group, Maximum Joy) through to trip-hop, and on into the late 90’s and early 00’s post-rock scene (Crescent, Movietone, Planet Records). Then we have the various bassier electronic styles which flourished here (Dubstep etc.), on to the neo-industrial vibe which has been developing here for the last decade.

Aside from the physical crossover of the scenes dovetailing together (young’uns going to see stuff and lending from it or building upon it), the makeup and social fabric of the environment will always inform what goes on. Aside from the regular trip-hop comparisons we receive (which aren’t without merit although we haven’t necessarily been directly influenced by trip hop), we have also been regularly compared to Crescent and Movietone. These are two Bristol bands we had never even heard of, but which both turned out to be comparable in some vague sense, and we now love.