Chicago musician Clara Pale recently released a phenomenal E.P. called “Humiliation Rituals” which focuses on a post-punk/emo style with an underlying indie-pop/rock influence.
I caught up with Clara to talk about his early musical influences. How he started writing music and the making of the new album.
CMM-What was the first music that really made an impact on you as a kid and what artist or band did you enjoy the most?
Clara-In retrospect, I think Metallica’s And Justice for All was the genesis of many of the musical sensibilities I’d refine into adulthood. Until I was ten or eleven, I’d only really been exposed to the classic rock my parents played, then Justice blew my fucking head off—it was the bleakest, heaviest, most off-kilter record I’d ever heard. It was just so tight and so focused. It was all I thought about. I became obsessed with James Hetfield’s playing; I never cared much for learning the leads, it was all about the rhythms. I spent the rest of my teens digging through as much music as I possibly could, getting into all kinds of fun shit: post-punk, emo, indie rock, pop music, Lou Reed, Bowie, no wave, anything DIY, anything with an annoying genre tag, anything loud and ugly, anything narrative-driven, etc. I can pick out little bits of everything in my music, which is kinda half the fun for me. Of course none of the stuff I play now is remotely thrash, but I do see the through lines from that early obsession with Justice in my approach to writing and playing guitar music today. It’s gotta be percussive.
CMM-How did you start writing songs and developing your own sound?
Clara-I started writing my own stuff when I was seventeen. It was awful. I had no idea what I was doing, and a lot of the songs I wrote at first were really rudimentary Panda Bear-esque pop tunes. I didn’t have an audio interface, so I made do with one or two free synth plugins and some drum samples. I had no idea how to structure anything, how to write a progression, how to end a song. I used the built-in mic on my laptop for vocals, if I bothered to do any. But I had fun with it. Around 18-19 I got this cheap behringer two-input interface (which I’m still using) and that was when I started giving it some real attention since I could finally add guitars. I was heavy into bands like The Birthday Party, Gang of Four, Velvet Underground, Television, Sonic Youth, and I was already trying to cop the weird chords, the overdriven Fenders, the real snotty vocals and the more oblique lyrics. It all just kinda clicked for me around that time, and I think the work I’ve done since has been an effort to refine those early elements into something more concrete. Most of my sound now is, in one way or another, built around fucked-up boxed-in riffs, stilted rhythms, cheap synthesizers, cliched progressions, short-story lyrics, fidelity of varying quality. But I’m really loving where I’m headed, sonically. I spent so much time first learning what I couldn’t do well before I could really figure out what I was good at and what I loved making.
CMM-You recently released a record called “Humiliation Rituals”. What was the writing and recording process like and were there any particular pieces of gear you used to get the sound you were looking for?
Clara-I bought a few new pieces of gear before making this record that really helped me get the sound I wanted, but it was still a pretty simple setup. The guitars all run through my pedalboard—I use a Boss blues driver for the basic tones, which I’ll run thru a Rat OD and a Green Russian Big Muff for fuzzier sections, maybe some delay or reverb, but that’s about it—into a free amp sim. I’ve got a Fender Deluxe that sounds great but doesn’t suit my thin apartment walls, unfortunately. For synths, I use cheap Juno 60 and PS-20 emulations, and I’ve got a space echo plugin I’ll use for more colorful delays. All the drum sounds are just overcompressed stock samples. The actual writing and recording of the album was pretty quick, I made the whole thing in maybe a month. I’ll demo the whole song in one sitting if I can, putting down as many ideas and sounds as possible, and iron out arrangements later. Once I get the basic feel for the song I can often get the instrumentation down without much issue, but the vocals always give me trouble. I hate my voice to an extent, but I’ve come to appreciate its strengths, so I spend hours and hours working out how it best fits each song. This batch of songs in particular is an offshoot from another album my friend Gaby and I are making together now, so being in that headspace already definitely contributed to this album coming together so quickly.
CMM-If you could do a score for any film director, who would it be and what would the film be about?
Clara-Terrific question! I’m a huge John Carpenter fan, and The Thing is one of my favorite films, so I’m inclined to pick Carpenter just out of respect. Off the top of my head I’m picturing something industrial. Let’s say we’ve got an old steel town with a kind of dark folk history about it. Maybe there were accidents in the mill in the early twentieth-century that saw workers killed under unknown circumstances, and we see a group (historians? spiritualists? locals? descendants?) encounter evil, intrusive entities while investigating the area’s folk origins. They Live is another personal favorite, so setting up a story where Carpenter could get political sounds fun. Something real dark and cold, lots of blue light, suspiciously helpful company reps, found diary entries from workers of the time, etc. I think I could have a great time making some weird sounds and tunes for a film like this. If not Carpenter, maybe an early-era Jim Jarmusch film, that whole lost soul on the run in a gritty world kind of thing.
CMM-Anything coming up?
Clara-Lots of fun stuff coming! I mentioned another album that Gaby and I are finishing for our band that should be coming down the line, assuming I can finish up the vocal tracking real soon. They’re not dissimilar from the songs on Humiliation Rituals, but they’re definitely a bit poppier and more fun, more fleshed out, with a strong thematic focus that I’m really excited about. (Actually, Humiliation Rituals came to exist because I had some writers block while finishing the other songs and needed to take my mind off them for a bit.) I’m writing out a few short film segments to accompany the music on Humiliation Rituals that I’d like to shoot and cut together soon as well. No shows planned at the moment but always looking for a chance to play!
