Lyndsie Alguire  '…like butterfly wings' - new ambient album out now on Reflections 

Lyndsie Alguire makes music that’ll soundtrack your dreams, and her latest album ...like butterfly wings is a testament to that. Alguire’s debut release on Anjuna’s Reflections imprint highlights her uncanny ability to turn a feeling into song form, with the 11-track album rooted in nature and childhood innocence.

Alguire’s always felt emotionally at home with music. As a toddler she’d marvel at a beautiful piano her aunt had in the basement, spending entire visits glued to it, trying to play the theme tune from Care Bears. Alguire grew up in Cornwall, an idyllic city in eastern Ontario, Canada, with a landscape dominated by fields, forest, and gushing blue river. She comes back to visit in her music all the time.

When Alguire was 6, she started piano lessons. “I took it really seriously, even back then,” Alguire says. “Every night I was in my room practicing for hours and I kept doing that throughout high school.” As she worked her way through the Royal Conservatory of Music’s grade system, she felt she couldn’t possibly write her own music; only genius composers like Bach and Mozart did that. But then 1998 came along and brought Scooter and Alice Deejay along with it, and the seeds of inspiration were planted.

A few years later, a teacher launched a music production class. “I got obsessed to the point where I was taking the equipment home and studying the manuals to understand how each machine worked,” Alguire says. She was a shy kid and preferred to spend her spare time at home chatting to internet friends on music forums. There was no record store in town, so she’d buy music magazines then download tracks from every band mentioned on Limewire. She fell down rabbit holes to the tune of The Get Up Kids, Joy Division, My Chemical Romance, Sparklehorse, Nine Inch Nails and dozens more. She read a lot, too. Ask her anything about Joy Division’s producer Martin Hannet and the delay unit he built. “Back then I was like when I grow up, I’m going to build things, and I’m going to have this big studio and I’m going to record artists every day,” Alguire says.

She moved to Montreal when she was 17 to study Electroacoustics at Concordia, and hone her skills in audio engineering and sound design. “It was a very eclectic, strange programme,” she says. When she started making her own music, it didn’t sound too far off from what it sounds like today. She’s always made tracks based on her own intuition, allowing her mood to flow out in one or two takes, without overthinking it.

In 2011 she uploaded a couple of tracks onto Soundcloud and immediately got signed to a net label and booked to play a festival in Montreal. Her ethereal, other-worldly music fit into an emerging scene in Montreal during the early ’10s. “There was this loft space on the train tracks and they’d host this event called drone sleepover and build this big blanket fortress,” she says. “You’d have to crawl in through this blanket tunnel and then people would lie there all night, listen to us play this soothing, seamless music that didn’t stop until like 7 am.”

Alguire self-released her first album in 2013. It’s called Suspended In Light and feels more raw and textured than her latest releases but has that same ethereal glow. It was inspired by her move to Montreal and a strange longing for an imaginary version of her childhood. “I felt lonely and wanted to be seen and heard and understood,” she says. "Putting music on the internet was my way of doing that.”

She’s self-released an album pretty much every year since then, with some more percussion-heavy, others big on melody, and others leading with synth. Each one is connected by the same innocent thread, and her hope is that people will reconnect with the naivety of childhood when they listen to her music.

...like butterfly wings is Alguire’s 9th album and her first label release. It’s fresh like a breeze and free of beats, with tracks structured around a handful of piano notes so expertly placed they sound alight with power. through the boughs of the garden is a good example; the four-minute production sounds like getting lost in the mist. “It reminds me of Burial in a way,” Alguire says. “There are these little moments that feel like they’re emerging out the night and being whisked away.” Alguire wanted to keep the album as stripped back as possible, so recorded everything with a basic DAW and two synthesizers. “I think it really helped focus the palette,” she says.

Alguire’s come a long way since she tried learning the Care Bears theme when she was three. Now, when she sits at the piano she’ll play whatever comes up without too much thought. Sometimes she’ll release a piano piece in just one take and says all the keys on this album were unplanned. Sometimes she’ll leave small mistakes in; she sees them as snapshots of pure, exploratory moments.

This album is rooted in the beauty and mystique of nature, and Alguire lets the music inform the track names which is why they read like poetry. “When I was a kid I really believed in magic,” Alguire says. “So I started following this theme of symmetry, nature, and magic and baking it into the album.”