"His music filled me with the urge to connect with the world," Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith says of Emile Mosseri.

She first heard his work while watching the 2019 film The Last Black Man In San Francisco; just minutes in, she paused it to look up who did the score and wrote to him immediately.

"I love Emile's ability to create melodies that feel magically scenic and familiar like they are reminding you of the innocence of loving life." Those talents saw recognition in 2020 with an Oscar nomination for Mosseri's original score to the film Minari.

He was already a fan of Smith's and became increasingly intrigued by her impressionistic process as they started to talk.

"The music feels so spiritual and alive and made from the earth," Mosseri says. "I think of her as the great conductor, summoning musical poetry from her orchestra of machines." I Could Be Your Dog / I Could Be Your Moon, their two-part collaborative album, introduces an uncanny fusion of their sonics.

Constructed using synthesizer, piano, electronics, and voice, this soft-focus dream world is lush, evocative, and fleeting.

It finds two composers tuning their respective styles inward as an ode to mutual inspiration, a celebration of the human spirit and its will to surrender to the currents of life.

As a full album set, I Could Be Your Dog / I Could Be Your Moon moves fluidly from track to track, panning through textural vignettes.

Two roughly 17-minute halves, the set evokes the bittersweet sense of something too bright or rare to last, a short-lived glimpse into a golden hour.

There is a dreamy, elemental intention to this music, which Smith and Mosseri say came naturally, as they both embraced intuitive interplay throughout their creative back-and-forth.

The stylistic threads of each composer are recognizable yet become more ambiguous as the album progresses, sewn into a singular vision.