Artist Statement

Elysse Cloma is an artist based on Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Territories. As drawn to sound and music as she is to writing, she debuted her solo music project, clara sanchez in late 2021, which uses North American folk music styles to tell her stories as an Asian-Canadian woman living in the diaspora.

Project Description

Nothing makes me feel more self-loving than hearing my singing voice echo through the heavy reverb of my family’s Magic Mic, a karaoke microphone that doubles as a remote control and comes with a guidebook for your at-home karaoke song selection pleasure.

Karaoke is a ubiquitous activity at Filipino gatherings, and just the thought of it gives me a rush of nostalgia for all of the good times I have had singing with my family. I recall the melodrama of my aunts choosing romantic ballads in Tagalog, the way my uncles loved jamming to songs by The Beatles, and the way I felt seen and celebrated at the end of a song, when everyone would clap for me after my performance of what is still my favourite karaoke song: “We’ve Only Just Begun” by The Carpenters. I have karaoke to thank for helping me discover my love for singing, and for being a safe space to enjoy music with a sense of play.

These days, when I go to karaoke with friends, the environment we create together is the same as what I grew up with. We sing gleefully for hours, we pick songs that make each other laugh, and we fill the room with the joy of finding chosen family. This type of joy reminds me of Audre Lorde’s vision of the erotic: “That deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy–comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible...For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life pursuits that they feel in accordance with the joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.” Singing karaoke helps me reach my deepest capacity for joy. To me, it is self-care witnessed by community.

For this residency I used the idea of karaoke as self-care and channelled it into the creation of a midi instrumental using Ableton Live. I took my song “ben” and reproduced it as a “karaoke version” by borrowing from the sonic world of the Magic Mic. The goal was to keep the character of the recorded song while translating it into synth/instrumental format. This was a great exercise in arranging, taking a song and recreating it from scratch, and getting to practice my production skills as I’m still learning how to use Ableton to my advantage. In the process I created a drum rack, and put effects on synths to mimic the Magic Mic sounds.