Teeming with rich and alluring vocals, layers of lush melodies, and evocative lyrics, the sophomore album, Dark River, from Lydia Luce is ripe with reasons to fall in love with this body of work. Her compositions beautifully convey the sentiments she was channeling as she poured her conquered emotional trauma into the project. Even though she only has two albums to call her own, it’s immediately evident that Luce has long been a master of her craft. A string virtuoso at the age of six, Lydia was classically trained by her mother, a professional conductor for the Ars Flores Symphony Orchestra, who started Lydia and her brother in music at a very young age. Lydia went on to obtain her Master’s at UCLA in the viola, studied ethnomusicology, performance and songwriting at Berklee, and traveled and studied Ghanaian music and instruments like her favorite, the gyil, which is a wooden xylophone with gourds underneath. She then worked at world music label Smithsonian Folkways Records. Luce said of her involvement with Smithsonian Folkways, “When I worked there, I wanted to be an ethnomusicologist, I think that as an artist, looking back on seemingly random things, I see them as all aligning. I love learning about different things and music and going deep. That experience made me have a deeper appreciation of music and where it comes from, its origins and thinking about that in a way and trying to always promote diversity in my personal music, and in Lockeland Strings, I try to focus on making those shows diverse, culturally and musically.” All of these experiences shaped the music she would ultimately come to make.
