Lia Ices Shares Aura Video for "Family Album" via VOGUE

LIA ICES REVEALS GROUNDBREAKING VIDEO FOR TITLE TRACK OF NEW LP FAMILY ALBUM FEATURED IN VOGUE FAMILY ALBUM OUT NOW VIA NATURAL MUSIC

Lia Ices has revealed the video for the title track of her recent album Family Album.   Collaborating with director, Aaron Brown (Cass McCombs, Girls), the clip represents a breakthrough in capturing the relationship between the artist  and the human aura, which exists beyond the capacity of our physical eyes. Setting out to deconstruct the relationship between invisible human energies and contemporary filmmaking, they used “Aura-photography”, which captures the energies emitted by all living creatures.  A frame-accurate camera needed to be sourced - Alumni of LucasArts, S+D got the word out and an obscure camera was made available.  The final music video is an unedited, 500 ft. mag of 35mm 4-perf film, quadruple exposed at Step + Direction, Sonoma and developed and scanned at Fotokem, Burbank.   Lia says, “Family Album (the full album) comes from my realizing the power of my femininity and tapping into the wonder that is nature.  As with all of my music, I am documenting myself, I am documenting my life. It’s a spiritual practice that helps me process what it is to be alive.     The song family album is about crystallizing a very specific moment in time; the preciousness of my tiny daughter, the real threat of losing our home to a wildfire, knowing that I found my own Eden on the mountain and then imagining it disappearing. It is about gratitude for the here and now.  The video for the song takes that documentation even further by capturing my aura as I perform the song in one take, adding another layer to what one can communicate when they lay their heart out — the poetry, the melody and the light.” The video premiered at Vogue today and they note, “Listening to Lia Ices’s song “Family Album” is already a little bit of a transcendental, heady experience. With her breathy vocals and psychedelic folk sound, Ices makes you feel like you’re floating away somewhere, probably westward, towards Ices’s home in California....clouds of blue, green, violet, and occasionally red fade in and out around Ices as she sings, adding an ethereal aspect to the already emotional song..”  Read their interview with Lia HERE and watch the clip here:

Lia Ices released Family Album, via her own label Natural Music. She went into the studio with the late producer JR White (Girls) - marking the last album he worked on.  Lia says, “experiencing JR’s creative genius so intimately is a gift I will always cherish and I'm so grateful my songs were touched by his magic. This album means something different to me now that the person I made it with is gone —  it is a symbolic reminder that music is eternal, he lives forever in this album.”  They recorded Family Album all over California: three studios in LA, one in Stinson Beach, and one in San Francisco. “There's a clarity to the album,” Ices says of the production, “you can hear what I'm saying, you can hear what the instruments are doing. But I really think that because the production supports the ethos you can dive in even deeper.” It was organic: Ices, White, and the four-man backing band she had record with her, live in the studio.  Family Album’s three singles, “Hymn,” “Earthy” and “Young on the Mountain,”  drew the attention of NPR, Flood, Brooklyn Vegan, Northern Transmissions, Under The Radar, PopMatters, and Ghettoblaster, among others.  "’Family Album’ is subdued, rooted, and no less lovely than the rest of her exquisite catalog to date...Family Album is a largely warm offering allowed to roam where it wants without any heavy hand at work behind it. It’s present, not plastic, and Ices’ songs are all the better for it." Under The Radar “the arrangements she’s crafted are brilliantly tinged with vintage influences and perfectly embody the flowy nature of her Northern Californian setting. With mysticism and incredible intrigue, Lia Ices transports any willing listener to a beautiful, expansive place that is as pleasant as it is wistful." Flood "Her muse is still intact."  American Songwriter  “Sun-dappled folk-pop..Family Album is effervescent and pastoral, with Ices’ honey-hued vocals blooming across its nine tracks about the grounding of motherhood, the wildness of the West Coast, and the freedom that only comes with radical self-realization....It’s the kind of dreamy place we all hope to get to someday, understanding what we’re here to do and doing it, fearlessly." No Depression “Throughout Family Album, Ices is inspired, renewed, and at peace with the natural world. The nine songs that result as a byproduct of that peace are beautiful and unclouded in a way that Ices reached for but never quite achieved on earlier albums.”  All Music "(Family Album is) stunning"  American Songwriter "The music moves effortlessly through Americana and psychedelia just as much as minimalist piano and vocals....Her songs are infused with spirit, with nature, with universal forces like synergy—and yet, she doesn’t even creep near New Age territory. Instead, these are the genuine testimonies of a woman preoccupied with the capital-M Mysteries of existence"  Earbuddy  "The vocals ... are magical!" A Journal Of Musical Things “Family Album reveals itself as a carefully woven tapestry, every song providing a picture, a symbolic moment in Lia Ices’ life...a breathtaking piece of work” Big Takeover "Ices took a step back from micromanaging every aspect of this new record and tapped a new fountain of inspiration and mutual effort. And it shows marvelously."  Treblezine "The music is itself mystically reverent: the heartbeat of piano like waves against The Lost Coast, the reverb echo like the vast cathedral hush of towering oaks, and the laid-back drum feel is like our old favorite records caught the electric spiritual current drawn forth by the gentle rhythms of ancient California mountains."  OZMA "Family Album carries that deep shag, Redwood-gothic veneer intersecting at the corner of Tori Amos and Mazzy Star, with directionals pointed at the lighter textures of Kate Bush." 48 Hills "wildly evocative, hypnotic and just plain great"  Quboz "delicate and intimate"  Aupium "The first thing that jumps out when listening to Lia Ices is her voice. It’s one that flutters and purrs and comforts and pulls, always with grace top of mind, taking the listener on a journey through lived-in Americana that straddles a line between real and fantasy."  Vanyaland "home-grown pop-kissed figments"  Maximum Ink It’s was a long personal journey to get to Family Album. After over a decade on the east coast, from New York City to the Hudson Valley, this is Ices’ first California album. It’s also a return to the piano, written on the precipice of motherhood. “Coming to California and living on the mountain and being in nature, and then starting to grow a human, I wanted to make something without having any ulterior motives other than letting what naturally happens, happen,” she says. She felt parallels between her musical output and occupying an archetypically feminine space; being confronted with the intense, grounding feelings surrounding motherhood made it hard to bullshit pretty much anything. Written during the first of three weeks in which Ices and her husband were evacuated from their home during the forest fires in 2017, “Family Album” is about immediacy and memory, and again that piercing contrast between the beauty of nature and its aloofness.  “Making art is communal,” says Ices. But that doesn’t mean Family Album isn’t the most Lia Ices album to ever exist. Part of that is allowing a higher level of collaboration than ever before, part is motherhood, part is Sonoma’s Edenic Moon Mountain, part is the Wild West freedom inherent in Californian lifestyle, part is an awareness of herself, and, most significantly, of growing ever more into that. Ices started her own label, Natural Music, because she felt empowered by herself, by the places that she was able to reach within herself and translate into music, and she wanted to follow the freedom that feeling gave her. “There's a synchronicity to it, about the way things have happened or who I've met,” Ices says of Family Album. There’s a “universal timing” to this record that it’s had since its beginning, with Ices’ ripening. “It keeps being a teacher to me, it has its own energy field around it.”  Lia Ices has released 3 critically acclaimed albums - 2008’s Necima (Rare Book Room) followed by Grown Unknown (Jagjaguwar Records) in 2011, and then the simply titled Ices in 2014, also on Jagjaguwar Records.  Her music has been covered from Vogue to Pitchfork to The New York Times and has been heard on HBO’s GIRLS, Gray’s Anatomy, and Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart.     Find Lia Ices here: Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook