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There’s a new face in town, but if you see it, you won’t know. Not yet, at least. Cari Clara wants to reinstall the element of mystery to music, which he feels has been lost.
The 27-year-old singer/composer considers his new home in Cincinnati an experiment of sorts. He plans to release his full-length debut, Fleeting Fare, to an audience that’s never heard his music or his name. He hopes the response he does or doesn’t get will be based only on the music and not on the man behind the curtains.
“I truly don’t think a social identity has anything to do with recorded music,” Clara says. “Don’t get me wrong — the two are surgically attached in modern music. But I want to see if they can exist apart. To experience a piece of music with no pre-given vision in your head is a gift.”
A native of Del Mar, Calif., Clara moved to San Francisco after high school, picking up the guitar as a street performer and adopting the name he now goes by.
“In San Fran, I had a rebirth on many levels, and I wanted the line between my past and present to be large as the ocean and black as night,” he says.
Clara established a fan base in San Francisco over his five-year stint there, but opted for a change of scenery, landing first in Chicago and most recently in Cincinnati.
He’s never had a band experience that fully satisfied him, always preferring the pure internal explorations of solo recording. He sees Cincinnati as a clean slate, free of the entanglements that social life and performance image have upon the perception of music. He’ll consider getting a band together to perform his work after he releases Fleeting Fare. But from a songwriting standpoint, Clara isn’t interested in collaboration.
“When something is solely seen through by one artist it remains untainted as an expression — for better or worse, the emotion remains true in all aspects of the recorded work,” Clara says.
The son of a cinematic composer father and a poet mother, Clara doesn’t see his parents as having a direct influence in the music he creates, although he has recorded compositions for independent films and his natural talent for lyricism is evident.
Clara fuses natural lo-fi sounds, vintage instruments and special effects for an aesthetic that is old and new. His compositions are emotional photographs, born of pounding, tribal beats, subtly building melodies and a sonorous hum that mounts with instrumental layers. He finds a fullness in tonal minimalism, in part owing to his ethereal, wind-riding vocals, but also due to his talent for patterning simple musical movements in such a way as to make something more of them.
Asked about his artistic influences, Clara draws parallels between his songwriting process and the work of abstract painters like Jackson Pollock.
“With Pollock, painting became this exercise in getting it out, just putting it on the canvas,” he says. “And then when he got into all these layers of paint, I think Pollock started to see how it made sense. Pollock was doing this thing and then stepping back and asking, ‘What was my initial purpose here?’ And then he puts the finishing touches on it to make it this beautiful thing. And that’s exactly what I try to do. A lot of my songs will run along, monotonally, or atonally, with one chord, but there’ll be a vocal movement that’s so important in the song that I’ll concentrate on it and try to make it the most important part. The song might start slow and meander, but when it gets to that part, you know what it’s about.”
His songs explore falling in and out of love with an intensity and intimacy that tugs at your heart. He opens himself up to release everything, including some darker moments he says surprise even him. In “Last Gasp,” he explores the thought of suicide with droning beats, monotone vocals and lines like “Everyone leaves a trail of something/Red carpet for the wolves to find me.”
My favorite on Clara’s five-song demo is a track called “The Design,” featuring a guest female lead vocalist who sounds surprisingly like Clara.
“I wanted to make it like that, a girl singing the male line and me singing the high harmony that sounds like the girl’s part,” says Clara. “I think a lot of the character of Cari Clara, going along with the anonymity, goes into this sort of gender-blurring.”
For Clara, the nomadic life has been a source of inspiration.
“Some of the music (on Fleeting Fare) was written when I was in San Francisco, and things weren’t going great,” he reveals. “And some of the songs actually have a little bit of resolution to them by finishing them here.”
Though he chooses to remain faceless while he finishes recording, Clara hopes to find a welcome home in the local music scene. Fleeting Fare is scheduled for a fall release.
This article appears in May 29 – Jun 4, 2002.
