Clara de Asís is a Spanish guitarist, composer, and performer living in France. All of her works involve electro-acoustics, minimal approaches, and sparse studio composition. For her output, she uses different combinations of objects, materials and sound sources, with the main focus on guitar.

This CD release appears on the always worth Another Timbre, and takes in six tracks- which have running times between three  & twelve minutes. This is most certainly music that needs both patience, and concentration- due the extremely sparse, pared-back, repetitive quality of the works.

The album opens with the title track, and we are straight into more difficult waters. The piece is the longest here at 12.18, and all it consists of is a series of very spaced-out guitar string patterns/ plucks, and a slowly growing presence of ringing gong/ bell tones. Both elements play out a map of repetitive yet at times jarring notation, with an effective use of both natural reverb & fade as part of the composition. The whole thing has a very stern zen-like quality to it, though there is certainly a nice feeling of very subtle building tension throughout.

Directly after this, we have the just shy of six minutes of "Know Nothing", and this is one of the more busy & layered tracks here. As it finds an often disorientating blend of churning, drilling, thumbing, and creaking electro-acoustic textures. I’d certainly say this track moves towards to more mechanical- yet subtle noise-bound side of things, though there are rapid chiming & ringing semi-harmonic elements present. After the building feel of the first track, this feels more random, though none the less rewarding.

The remaining four tracks move between on minimal & moody percussive dwells ‘n’ grinds, spaced-out & slowly picked guitar/ subtle percussive blends, or very quiet guitar-based ambient hovers. It’s really an album that has to be played either on headphones or in an extremely quiet space- as otherwise, you lose all the depth & intimacy of the work.

Do Nothing is a fairly brave record- which needs more than a few listens to really sink in & full comprehend. So it’s certainly one for those  albums you need to put time & effort into it. Maybe it’s not an album I can see my self-returning to that often, due to the stark, minimal and narrow range of the work- but I certainly respect what Ms de Asís is trying to do here.