I Could Be Your Dog / I Could Be Your Moon

Description

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith first encountered Emile Mosseri’s work when watching the 2019 film The Last Black Man In San Francisco. Emile’s ability to conjure magical, scenic, and familiar melodies struck a chord, talents that would be recognized in 2020 with an Academy Award nomination for the score he created for the film Minari. On his end, he was already a fan of Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and became further intrigued by her impressionistic process once they began conversing. I Could Be Your Dog / I Could Be Your Moon, their two-part collaborative album, is a strange fusion of their sounds. Built using synthesizer, piano, electronic system, and voice, this dream-like world of blurry edges is lush, evocative, and ephemeral. It features two composers tuning their respective styles inward as an ode to mutual inspiration, a celebration of the human spirit and its willingness to surrender to the currents of life. Early in their correspondence, Kaitlyn and Emile realized they were neighbors in Los Angeles and met up for a few hikes. Their conversations blossomed into a musical exchange over email. This exercise became a sketch, the beginning of their first song together, "Log In Your Fire," with Emile adding flourishes to Kaitlyn's cathartic synth lines to harmonize with. Lyrically, the sentiment is beautiful and open. From there, the duo composed a series of musical foundations, trading files remotely, nurturing the final result as the distant days of 2020 settled in. Kaitlyn likens the experience of collaborating to the exciting uncertainty one feels when starting a garden, doing what you can to facilitate growth while also appreciating being surprised by what will actually grow. Over the summer of 2021, the duo finished working on the follow-up, I Could Be Your Moon, expanding their musical language as the first installment was released in September. The songs from these newer exchanges find them even more in sync, becoming percussive and harmonic experimentations. A unified vocal presence emerged. Taken now as one complete album, I Could Be Your Dog / I Could Be Your Moon moves fluidly from track to track, shifting through textural vignettes. In two halves of roughly 17 minutes, the whole thing evokes the bittersweet feeling of something too brilliant or too rare to last, an ephemeral glimpse of the golden hour. There is a dreamy and elemental intention to this music, which the duo says came naturally, as they both intuitively interacted throughout their creative back-and-forth. The stylistic threads of each composer are recognizable but become more ambiguous as the album progresses, stitched into one singular vision.