Bleep

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith first heard Emile Mosseri in a movie. It was 2019’s The Last Black Man In San Francisco to be more specific, a film for which Mosseri did the score. So moved by his work was Smith that within minutes of starting it, she paused and wrote to him in admiration. As luck would have it, Mosseri himself was already a fan of hers, citing her experimental synth music as something like a conductor directing an orchestra of machines. Smith and Mosseri also discovered they were neighbours in Los Angeles and following a few hikes, their correspondence quickly turned into music exchanges. Such is the backdrop for I Could Be Your Dog / I Could Be Your Moon, their new two-part collaborative LP of fusionary sonics. Built up from synthesizers, voice, and piano, I Could Be sees these two composers melding their minds to create a hazy new world of sound, one that both breaks free from their own practices while also paying tribute to their mutual inspiration. A sort of celebration of the act of making connections through art, if you will.

Those early emails translated into one of the album’s most tender cuts like ‘Log In Your Fire.’ Working off Smith’s beautiful synths, Mosseri sings of letting go with a partner, fully committing and submitting oneself to a feeling, whether romantic or otherwise. From there the duo continued sending files back and forth, slowly building towards a double LP full of that simpatic interchange. A quarantine album in the truest sense, Smith and Mosseri both confirm that the collaboration brought them a unique kind of companionship at a time when the usual methods of interaction were out of the question. That relieving sense of friendship is clear when listening to I Could Be Your Dog / I Could Be Your Moon.