During a session for their 2020 debut album, Tara Clerkin Trio were interrupted by building work taking place outside. Scrapes and clangs of scaffolding got caught in the chord loop they were making on a childhood keyboard at the time. Rather than scrap the recording and start again, they grew attached to the soft dissonance of the metal, and sought to replicate it in the final version of the song. They ended up using a more audible clip from a royalty-free sample website, Tara Clerkin recalls, laughing. “We had to credit the guy who had recorded the sound on the sleevenotes.”
These happy accidents and incidental noises have gone on to shape much of the Bristol-formed band’s breezy, collage-like sound, which has charmed underground music fans across the spectrum (including jazz heads – despite the name, they stress that they are not a jazz band). That first album is now on its fourth repress and they’ve released two acclaimed EPs since. Drifting somewhere between minimalist jazz, avant-pop and trip-hop, their looping compositions are born from hours of improvising and layering. Their melodies clatter, clonk and wander in strange directions around Clerkin’s daydreamy incantations, conjured from a motley crew of instruments they can and can’t play properly.
Like the scaffolding, the found sounds that lurk around Tara Clerkin Trio’s tracks enhance their uncanny atmosphere: some footsteps here, some chimes there. Occasionally the band, made up of Clerkin, her partner Sunny Joe Paradisos and his younger brother Pat Benjamin, even sample themselves, warping and recycling past recordings. “The more you sample yourself, the less samples you have to clear” (for copyright) says Paradisos, wryly. “You just make your own noises.”
It is impressive how full their music can sound, despite there being just three of them (a previous version of the band had eight members). “It’s a cliche, but limitation does force you to be creative,” says Benjamin, before Paradisos chimes in: “It’s all the power of the loop pedal. That’s our fourth member.”
We’re meeting in a pub in Stoke Newington, north London, close to where Clerkin and Paradisos now live (Benjamin is still based in Bristol). They’re gearing up to release their second album, Somewhere Good – their most pop-oriented record yet, and one that critics are already calling a potential album of the year. While it still features their signature scattering of oddball sounds (a comb, a wicker lamp), it feels like a step in a new direction: there is more structured songwriting and storytelling, plus vocals from Paradisos for the first time. On one track, they even ditch the loop pedal. “Like a real band,” Benjamin quips.
The album arrives three years after their last EP, a period that has been fraught with challenges. After living in Bristol for 16 years, Clerkin and Paradisos were priced out of their rented house. Then they moved to Liverpool to care for Clerkin’s mother who was ill, a predicament that forced the band to cancel a US tour and take a six-month break. “It was by far the shittest year I think I’ll probably ever live through,” says Paradisos.
The lure of job opportunities brought the couple to London, where they’ve been juggling to make finances work over the past six months, through pet sitting, sofa-surfing and subletting. They almost couldn’t make today’s interview: “I’ve got two new bosses texting me, like: ‘What’s your availability next week?’” says Paradisos, who also works as a landscaper. “I was like, I don’t know, because I have this quite important thing that’s happening at some point, but also I can’t afford to lose these jobs and not earn.”
The new album was made in similarly precarious circumstances, written and recorded between tour dates in a string of different flats, studios and Airbnbs. The last mix took place on a laptop in New York Public Library, and the masters made their final journey from an airport in Cyprus. “It was a time when we were just touring like crazy,” says Benjamin. “Between that and working, it’s so hard to find the times where it would just be like: oh, we’ve got a three-day gap … Let’s find a studio that we can do some stuff in.”
They laugh about it now, but that balancing act, paired with the situation back home, almost pushed them to give up. “I kind of feel like a more sensible person in our situation would have stopped doing it a while ago,” says Clerkin, only half-joking.
It’s all part of what Paradisos refers to as a “hostile environment to do art” in the UK, something the band is still adjusting to, almost a decade in. “It’s really quite rare to come across working-class artists, because there’s basically a rule that you have to do it and not get paid for 10 years,” Clerkin says. “Doing tours three times a year or whatever, you can’t really go and get a full-time job. But then the tours don’t pay for you to live the rest of the time.”
As with their last two EPs, the album is coming out on the in-house label of east London record shop World of Echo, who they’ve become friends with. After the band spoke to several A&R people at bigger labels, they concluded that an advance to make an album – “is like a payday loan”, says Paradisos. “If you give away so many rights, you’ll never get another penny from your music.”
The new album captures some of these qualms: Lazy Daisy is about losing a job, while Silently contemplates grief. Later on, Slow Island mourns a place made unrecognisable by gentrification. But an optimism shines through, in the sprightly chords, the playful percussion, and in Clerkin’s high, bright voice. “Even though we were going through so much, we wanted to make something that was positive – something that recognised pain in an honest way, but also offered some sort of momentum forwards,” she says. “Like, we are still doing it, even though we’ve hated how skint we’ve been for many years. We carry on because we love it and it feels like one of the most meaningful things we can do with our time.”