Jacqueline L Waters · The story behind the work
Before Aurelia,
there was the keyboard.
Jacqueline began playing on a small, toy-like keyboard, captivated by the idea of becoming as good as Bruno from the film and television series Fame. She picked up a guitar in her early twenties.
Aurelia brings that musical history into a world shaped by another lifetime of work: graphic design, textures, shapes, clothes, and imagined places.
A living-room answer to a childhood dream
On 7 March 2020, Jacqueline shared Flame It under the name 48Denier. Recorded as a private living-room jam, it features her playing a Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol S49 Mk2 keyboard alongside samples of her own guitar playing.
It was a personal question put into music: how close had she come to the childhood dream that Bruno from Fame inspired? The piece nods to the theme song performed by Irene Cara. Its rough recording quality is part of that history; even a later remaster leaves those limitations audible.
The original description called it the second song from Silky, an album that never got made. What remains is a glimpse of Jacqueline playing music years before Aurelia—a personal performance, rather than a showcase for sound design.
A visual history becoming a musical world
Beyond her personal playing, Jacqueline began experimenting professionally with sound design in 2019.
Years of experimentation in Second Life—with skybox textures, shapes, and virtual environments—inform Aurelia’s appearance, wardrobe, art style, and surroundings. The continuity is in Jacqueline’s eye and choices, without claiming that every third-party component she has worked with was her own invention.
Jacqueline identifies the avatars in these earlier Second Life videos as her designs. The videos offer a look at the virtual characters and animation that form part of her creative history:
From the page into the music
Jacqueline also writes as Vesper Denier. The characters in her fiction hold fragments of her real self, separated into traits that can take on lives of their own. Aurelia began in The Doll House; through music, she becomes another expression of the same creator.
The woman behind the work
Jacqueline is the founder of Black Cat Media, a graphic designer, marketer, author, and the creator behind this music. These projects form a living portfolio of what the company can create for and with others: a connected identity carried through different media.