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             As a vehicle for pianist and songwriter, Ida Nilsen, Great Aunt Ida has existed in various shapes and places since 2003, beginning and returning to Vancouver, BC. Influenced by a variety of genres but rooted in the popular song, Nilsen's writing has been called “intimate and honest”, “warm and spare,” bordering on misanthropic, and “somehow unlike any other girl/piano combo.” An active member of Vancouver’s music scene in the late 90s and 2000s, Nilsen was also a member of acclaimed “post-rock” group The Beans, alt-country Radiogram, experimental all-improv group Cunt, The Gay, The Buttless Chaps, and the Toronto-based Violet Archers. Great Aunt Ida released three albums between 2005 and 2011: Our Fall (2005 Hive-fi), How They Fly (2006 Northern Electric), and Nuclearize Me (2011 Zunior). A fourth album, Unsayable, was released on September 7th 2021, marking a return to the music world after a long absence.

            The subject matter of Unsayable is not light – the songs’ characters struggle with betrayal, mental health, troubling relationships, the meaning of love, and the minefield zone between emotion and action. Musically, the album explores this darkness without melodrama; the rhythm section of Nilsen, on piano and Wurlitzer, with Vancouver veterans Mark Haney, on double bass, and Barry Mirochnick, on drums, settles into easy, laidback pockets that sometimes hint at falling apart but never do. Recorded at Afterlife, the old Mushroom Studios, with engineer John Raham, the sound is fleshed out with guitar parts by Jonathan Anderson and Dan Goldman, trumpet and effects by JP Carter, strings by Meredith Bates and Sarah Kwok, woodwinds by Krystal Morrison and Jennifer Vance, and background vocals by Mirochnick and Patsy Klein, players that come from roots, folk, improvised jazz, new music, and classical backgrounds. Accordingly, the album’s range of influences is expansive - “Horses” recalls the interplay of strings and pedal steel of late 70s era Neil Young, while other tracks would sound at home in New York’s Downtown jazz art-rock scene – yet the disparate styles find a coherence, in production and arrangement choices and Nilsen’s consistently unique melodicism, that gives Unsayable the flow of an album, rather than a collection of songs.

Flash to 2026: after 9 years in school and masters degrees in architecture and landscape architecture, Great Aunt Ida's new material reflects on grief, change, connection, and relationships with space and place. The sound of your childhood doorbell meets reaching for the high notes at karaoke. electron. conveyor.