Lydia Ainsworth’s pop experiments sound like they’re made for big screens. Close your eyes while listening to her recent debut, “Right From Real“, and the considerable power of her orchestral strings, horns, and dense, wordless harmonies transports you to a dark cinema, where surreal images tumble like falling skies, and it’s not quite clear what comes next
So it makes sense that the Toronto-based Ainsworth is a composer of film scores who studied at both McGill University in Montreal and New York University, where she finished graduate school in 2012. At McGill, she once composed a Philip Glass-inspired score for a 50-piece orchestra; at NYU, she studied with Joan La Barbara, a pioneer of extended vocal technique who sung for John Cage, Steve Reich, and Judy Chicago. It was La Barbara who encouraged Ainsworth to sing on the film scores she was making, which she did for the first time in 2011. That same year, when a friend asked Ainsworth to perform at a party, she began writing her own songs in earnest. “I didn’t have any material,” Ainsworth explains of that first Brooklyn gig, “so I wrote a couple of songs and got a little orchestra together.” Those songs, “White Shadows” and “Candle”, became the seeds of Right From Real.
A self-described perfectionist, Ainsworth spent two years creating her debut LP. Owing to the record’s meditative quality, Ainsworth would take her demos and walk with them for hours around her Bushwick neighborhood, near the Montrose L train, over the Williamsburg bridge and back, clearing her mind to find perspective. She was inspired by “the notion that the impossible is possible, and is all around if you only look hard enough,” searching for a middle ground between beauty and terror. The resulting collection has the appeal of pop eccentrics like Kate Bush or Bat for Lashes, if refracted through the skewed kaleidoscope of her label, Montreal’s Arbutus Records, which released early work from a kindred spirit, Grimes.
This has quickly become one of my favourite and most played albums this year the orchestration is just incredible.
The Fat Angel Sings 