A few months ago, the Toronto singer and sound manipulator Lydia Ainsworth released the lovely and cinematic debut album “Right From Real“. And now she’s the latest in a long line of indie types to cover Chris Isaak’s deathless 1989 torch song “Wicked Game.” Ainsworth has been doing the song live for a while, and now she’s shared a recorded version of it, which layers up her voice in subtle and effective ways. Her version is mostly just voice and piano, but it feels lush and finely orchestrated, mostly because of quiet production details that you might not consciously notice but which add to the feel of the thing.
Posts Tagged ‘Lydia Ainsworth’
LYDIA AINSWORTH – ” Wicked Games “
Posted: December 17, 2014 in MUSICTags: Composer, Lydia Ainsworth, Right From Real, Toronto
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LYDIA AINSWORTH – ” Malachite ” and “PSI
Posted: December 17, 2014 in MUSICTags: Composer, Lydia Ainsworth, Right From Real
Lydia Ainsworth, debut thrives on haunting melodies and draws inspiration from a wide range of musical sources, featuring use of voice sampling and string arrangements woven into a unique minimalist fabric.Composer / producer / singer Lydia Ainsworth has been secretly writing and recording songs over the past three years from bedrooms and basements between Toronto and Brooklyn. What began as pass-time sketches between composing music for film and multimedia projects has over time revealed an enchanting collection of experimental pop songs with a life of their own.
Blurring the boundaries between indie music, filmic orchestration, and electronic music, Lydia’s debut ‘Right From Real’ thrives on haunting melodies and draws inspiration from a wide range of musical sources: Verdi’s Requiem, Ace of Base, Bulgarian Choirs, Bernard Herrmann, Tones on Tail, Art of Noise, to name a few. This sense of unexpected marriages of influence flows throughout much of Lydia’s previous work which features use of voice sampling and string arrangements woven into a unique minimalist fabric.
All it took was encouragement from one of the most courageous vocalists of the 20th century to get a New York University grad student (and Toronto native) to sing. Thus became Lydia Ainsworth, Joan La Barbara protégé, whose fractured-fairytale, electro-etched chamber music skirts, a widening chasm of unspeakable terror. Whether that chasm is an encroaching technological age or something way more personal, naming her influences and guessing at her fears aren’t fair ways to describe Ainsworth’s debut. Because the lush Right From Real is something altogether so much more immediate: pop with a perfectionist’s bent poised irrevocably on the cusp of a complete breakdown.
From first track “Candle,” in which a well-made bed of strings gives way to first Ainsworth’s confident voice and then the dissolution of the same—her harmonies faulting, flickering like the flame of the light source she names—through a bleeping choral séance “White Shadows”, unnerving hymns to robot religions “Malachite”, and certifiably radio-ready hits fringed with face-melting fog (“PSI”), Ainsworth’s first album is more than impressive, it’s impeccable. And it’s all there in the name: she pulls order from chaos; she extracts the “right” from the “real.” Not because she feels obliged to temper her more experimental tendencies with pop trappings, but because in the neatness of a traditionally minded song, the more unwieldy, destructive sentiments of her art burn ever fiercer. It is a fierce debut, after all, and being Lydia Ainsworth’s first, one wonders where she has to go from here. Like Grimes, who similarly found her voice on Montreal label Arbutus, Ainsworth’s gift for melody and effortless arrangements will undoubtedly mean bigger things. But if Right From Real’s tendencies are any sign, she’s heading face-first deeper into that chasm. Things are about to get really real.—
The Fat Angel Sings 