Out Today: Clarice Jensen's "In holiday clothing, out of the great darkness" - Album Coverage from NPR, The Strad, and More
Album cover by DLT and press photos by Ebru Yildiz available here.
Clarice Jensen Releases New Album In holiday clothing, out of the great darkness
Out Today October 17, 2025 on FatCat/130701 Records
"With this album, Jensen reminds us how past and present can combine in potent, emotionally charged ways – how Bach's old school traditions and our new age of electronics can make arresting bedfellows." – Tom Huizenga, NPR Music
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Opening for Suzanne Ciani Presented by Age of Reflections this Fall
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"The Zen clarity of her sound recalls masters like Phill Niblock, evoking universes by honing in on narrow ranges of frequency. But the way Jensen shifts her drones, building them gradually and then hard-cutting to completely new tones, feels singular." – Pitchfork
www.claricejensen.com | www.fatcat.online/130701
Composer and cellist Clarice Jensen releases her fourth solo album, In holiday clothing, out of the great darkness, today October 17, 2025 via FatCat Records’ 130701 imprint. The new album showcases Jensen’s distinctive compositional approach, in which she improvises and layers her cello through shifting loops and a chain of electronic effects, exploring a series of rich, drone-based sound fields. Pulsing, visceral and full of color, her work is deeply immersive, marked by a wonderful sense of restraint and an almost hallucinatory clarity. Jensen recorded In holiday clothing, out of the great darkness as part of the Visiting Artist Programme at Studio Richter Mahr, the creative space co-founded by Yulia Mahr and Max Richter in Oxfordshire, England.
Jensen’s live performance schedule takes her across the country this summer and fall. She recently joined My Chemical Romance on their Long Live The Black Parade tour, performing a solo set in addition to playing with the band. This fall, she opens for Suzanne Ciani presented by Age of Reflections in Denver on November 15, San Francisco on November 21, New York on December 6, and Los Angeles on December 13, 2025. This summer she performed a solo show at Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City and with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at the Beacon Theatre in New York. Full concert schedule: www.claricejensen.com/events
Having made a solo move to the Berkshire Mountains in upstate New York in September 2020 after many years living in Brooklyn, Jensen found herself confronting and enjoying a newfound solitude as the non-stop movement and collaboration of city life as a musician had come to a standstill. The first LP she made post-move – Esthesis, released on 130701 in 2022 – is largely devoid of cello, synth heavy, and examines emotions in a self-conscious way from an isolated point of view that is nearly one-dimensional.
Jensen sets new parameters for In holiday clothing, placing the acoustic sound of the cello at the fore, and affecting the sound only through a few effects (octave displacement, delay, tremolo and looping). “It felt necessary to return to the rich acoustic sound of the cello that I've loved and produced for nearly my entire life, and to return to an expression of emotion that's multi-dimensional and sincere,” she notes.
As a soloist, Jensen endeavors to establish a new tradition of solo cello performance that integrates electronics with the storied and beloved performance practice intrinsic to the instrument. She places great importance on finding and working with effects pedals that integrate well with the cello (and avoids overt use of plugins or playback). Jensen considers the solo cello works of J.S. Bach as a central backdrop to this new album. Bach’s Solo Cello Suites display a rich range of voices created by one instrument. Having found ways to expand the sound and voice of the instrument through electronics, Jensen found it fitting to return to Bach's works – music she has played for many years – as a way to touch back in with the tradition of the instrument.
As a composer, Jensen insists that the programmatic elements of her albums align and ring true. This album’s title is taken from the quote from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, “… what steps forth, in holiday clothing, out of the great darkness." She writes, “the quote from Rilke had been bouncing around my mind for many years; the visualisation of musical ideas being born and echoing inside a ‘great darkness,’ then emerging ‘in holiday clothing’ felt very beautiful and tangible, and this essay, which to me is a manifesto in celebration of solitude, depicts what so many artists and composers experience when they endeavor solitary work. This album reflects a personal and conceptual exploration of what solo means.”
Previous Albums
The new album adds to Jensen’s growing discography. Her striking debut album For This From That Will Be Filled was released in April 2018 on the Berlin-based label Miasmah and followed in September 2019 by the "Drone Studies" EP, a cassette release via Geographic North. Signing to FatCat’s 130701 imprint in 2019, her sophomore album The experience of repetition as death was released April 2020. Naming it among the top 50 albums of 2020, NPR remarked "This collection of requiems for a dying mother ranks among the great ambient albums of the 21st century." Her album Esthesis was released in October 2022 and NPR ranked it among the Best Experimental Albums of the Year. Boomkat stated, “Jensen finds a fine line between in-the-moment, tactile precision and lingering hallucinatory afterimages that emerge from her improv/compositional system. The pieces betray an exquisite depth of feeling in Jensen’s diffractive rendering of shimmering layers and gently transitory movements,” with Magnetic Magazine reporting, “There is no doubt this album will impact people profoundly.”
Film Scores
Clarice Jensen’s music is a natural fit for film and she is increasingly in demand as a film and television composer. Her recent scores include Amber Sealey's No Man of God starring Elijah Wood which premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival; Takeshi Fukunaga's Ainu Mosir, which premiered at the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival; Fernanda Valadez's 2020 Sundance Film Festival award-winner Sin Señas Particulares (Identifying Features), for which Jensen was nominated for a 2021 Ariel Award for Best Original Music by the Mexican Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences; Caught in the Web: The Murders Behind Zona Divas (2024), a four-part Netflix documentary on femicide in Mexico from Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez; and A Want in Her, a documentary film from Myrid Carten which premiered at International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2024.
Collaborators
A versatile collaborator, Jensen has recorded and performed with a host of stellar artists including Jóhann Jóhannsson, Max Richter, Björk, Stars of the Lid, Dustin O’Halloran, Nico Muhly, Taylor Swift, Michael Stipe, the National and many others. In her role as the artistic director of ACME (the American Contemporary Music Ensemble), she has helped bring to life some of the most revered works of modern classical music, including pieces by Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Gavin Bryars, and more.
Clarice Jensen: In holiday clothing, out of the great darkness
FatCat Records/130701 | October 17, 2025
1. In holiday clothing, out of the great darkness - Part 1 [12:56]
2. From a to b [5:35]
3. 2,1 [4:11]
4. 1,2 [4:08]
5. In holiday clothing, out of the great darkness - Part 2 [8:35]
6. Unity [5:29]
Recorded at Studio Richter Mahr by Rupert Coulson, 30 October - 1 November 2024
Mastered by Alan Douches
Photography by Ebru Yildiz
Album art by DLT
