Clarice Jensen: “The experience of repetition as death”

Lately, the cellist Clarice Jensen, a co-founder of the versatile new-music group American Contemporary Music Ensemble, has turned her attention to fashioning solo works that use electronic effects. The idiom might seem ideal for our present state of isolation, but the music on her album “The experience of repetition as death” rejects meditative navel-gazing. Jensen deploys loops and layers to evoke the experience of attending to her terminally ill mother in her final weeks, adopting concepts from Freud and the feminist poet Adrienne Rich as structural ideas. Simple repetitions in “Daily” call to mind a caretaker’s elementary chores—their toll is implied as the music’s edges gradually soften and blur. Jensen’s electronically enhanced vocabulary can astonish: a guttural drone in “Day Tonight” resembles Tibetan chant, and, in “Metastable,” the incessant beep of hospital monitors morphs into a stately pipe-organ étude. “Holy Mother,” a mountainous, windswept threnody, and “Final,” where nostalgic crackles preface a plainspoken, hymnlike chorale, complete this album of near-supernatural potency.