“Each album I’ve made is a world of work on its own, in a way,” Copenhagen based composer, musician and producer Clarissa Connelly tells Leah Kardos in The Wire 482, “but with this album I feel I’m getting closer to the core of it, why I write music and what I actually want to say.”

Connelly's third album – following Tech Duinn and The Voyager – takes its title from Georges Bataille’s concept of the exterior “world of work”, which the French philosopher put forward in his 1957 text L’Érotisme. Here Connelly explains how this notion was the foundation of her latest work and shares other subjects, places, sounds and symbols that informed and influenced her writing.

Georges Bataille
L’Érotisme (1957)

This book is a heavy read. I took a year to read it, going back and forth to it. The idea that it is our movements in our everyday “world” that oscillate into ecstasy makes so much sense to me – music as movements, prayers, walks, runs, erotics. Somehow the book grasps around a great philosophy: what is magic? And, it succeeds in explaining a view of it – how our world, through movement, can turn into ecstasy. The foundation of my album World Of Work is dancing around these questions: do we believe in a greater beauty, in magic, or are we here in our work, bound to it? Or, can we oscillate through our work too? That being all kinds of work.

Hildegard von Bingen
Scivias (1152)

The angels sang to Hildegard through her prayers and she then wrote down what she had heard. She claimed: no it’s not me, I just heard it.

I started asking many questions whilst reading this book. Where do the good melodies come from when one writes music? Is it a big mixture of small parts of songs and melodies once heard, later forgotten?

Through her work (her prayer) she heard melodies, and I know through my own practice, it’s when walking from A to B, whilst walking through the park, stepping out of a bus that the good melodies come. I am not sure if it’s angels she heard, but diving into this piece made me look into new patterns of writing and therefore made me aware of my brain falling into wavelengths, in movement, where we can listen from, and where clear new melodies could grow out of.

Fanø, West Coast of Denmark

I started visiting a small island called Fanø in early 2020, an island in the North Sea off the coast of Southwestern Denmark, the northernmost of the Danish Wadden Sea Islands! I always go there with my friends who also work with composition and production here in Copenhagen.

We created a space on the island where we work and share work. It meant a whole lot to me, creating this album, being in peace, eating and sharing with my friends. The hills are beautiful, strange, and all the same size; small hills throughout the whole landscape. It looks like Middle Earth. Frogs sing, hiding in the grass in spring. And you can go for long walks without meeting a soul, running up and down each hill. I wrote a lot of the melodies from World Of Work running back home from those hills.

Willam Blake
Songs Of Innocence And Experience (1789)

It is truly magical. I’ve always been fascinated with Blake’s work and his paintings. It gives me the feeling of someone generously oversharing – not individually but oversharing the epic stories of life and death. Is he telling us too much? He asks questions instead of coming with statements:

When the stars threw down their spears,
and watered heaven with their tears,
did he smile his work to see,
did he who made the lamb make thee?

It is of course very Christian, he was a child of God, but in my opinion the questions expand the mind and do not only concern the religious.

Blake definitely pushed me towards a feeling I kept visiting while composing the album, and gave me the courage to ask the questions my heart has led me to.

Bells

I have been slightly obsessed with bells whilst writing the album the past few years; their sound, but also the great symbolic weight they have. They are in many ways the foundation of our society, our time (in Danish you say hvad er klokken? directly translated as what is the bell?). They are also still used for celebrations (birth, weddings) and times of alarm, if there is a fire or war is coming. Now we have amplified sirens, but in small towns, the bells will still chime if something is wrong and people have to go inside. I found it to be an amazing way to travel around Denmark when exploring new areas. I found the nearest church and asked if I could record the bell or bells if it was a bigger church. I was always let inside! Lucky me. Then I could look at the bell tower from the inside, the beautiful wooden or stone constructions, and also explore the bells’ often very interesting history. Because a lot of information is often cast into the iron – the year it was cast, who cast it and where – bells can be very valuable and so were often stolen, for instance, if a battle was lost. I am very interested in finding new knowledge that can give me the gift of viewing and understanding great perspectives in time. It can be very calming, just remembering that everything passes, time goes by. Bells give me that feeling because history is linked to them, right there, written in big letters, and in their chime they've been ringing for centuries. There are about five different church bells on World Of Work, from these recordings around Denmark.

Assistens Churchyard in Copenhagen

I often go to this green and quiet spot on Nørrebro and visited frequently whilst I was composing the album. It's the only place on Nørrebro where you can find really big trees with big fat trunks. I think it's good for you to spend time around something very old and at the same time alive! Ah, that is why old trees are a blessing. It is a churchyard you can hide in, with so many hidden spots, and the trees will cover you. This, again, makes me think of time and life passing through.

World Of Work is released by Warp 12 April. Read Leah Kardos's interview with Clarissa Connelly in The Wire 482. Wire subscribers can also access the article via the online library of back issues.