Album Of The Week: Lydia Ainsworth Right From Real

The music isn't the first thing you'll notice about Lydia Ainsworth's video for "Malachite," one of the year's best clips. Visually, the clip is a hypnotic nightmare, a cryptic tableau of street-dancers dressed like ghouls and moving like dream-logic wraiths. It's shot in some nondescript warehouse space and made to look like a single shot, as if to imply that strange and terrifying things are happening somewhere near you right now, in some room you might walk past everyday. But those rave-as-black mass visuals from director Matthew Lessner wouldn't have the impact they do if not for Ainsworth's music, a heady stew of gasping voices and tingling synths. The video is a true collaboration -- Lessner also wrote the song's lyrics -- but it feels like a demonstration of the ways that Ainsworth's music can push things even further into the uncanny. On the surface, Ainsworth is one of many people making glimmering, atmospheric electronic pop music in bedroom studios around the world. But almost none of those home-recording auteurs know how to layer up sounds the way Ainsworth does so effectively. And none of them has the power to raise goosebumps the way she can.