Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith Vinyl, CD & Tape 6 Items

"Art is awe, art is mystery expressed," writes Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. "Art is somatic, even if it is experienced cerebrally. It is felt." The central mysteries of Smith's ninth studio album, Let's Turn it Into Sound, have to do with perception, expression, and communication: How can we communicate when spoken language is inadequate? How do we understand what it is we're feeling? How do we translate our experience of the world into something that someone else can understand? For Smith, a self-described "feeler," the answers are inspired by compound words in non-English languages, translation, sculptural fashion, dance, butoh, wushu shaolin, and other forms of sensory and somatic experience. Just like fashion uses lines, shapes, colors, textures, and silhouettes to communicate on a sensual level separate from the conscious mind, Let's Turn it Into Sound strives to use sound to communicate what words alone cannot. "The album is a puzzle," Smith says. "[It] is a symbol of receiving a compound of a ton of feelings from going out into a situation, and the song titles are instructions to breaking apart the feelings and understanding them." The energized "Is it Me or is it You" comes from traversing the gaps between how you see yourself and how another might see you, through a filter of their own projections. The hushed sense of revelation that brackets "There is Something" refers to the feeling of walking into a room and being subconsciously aware of the dynamic present. All the while, Smith interprets these feelings through sound. This auditory interpretation process, driven by earnest curiosity, led Smith to record some thoughts and questions that popped up along the journey in Somatic Hearing_a booklet which accompanies the album. Over three frenzied months, recording alone in her home studio, Smith allowed herself to pursue new experiments to accompany her usual toolkit of modular, analogue, and rare synthesizers (including her signature Buchla), orchestral sounds, and the voice. She created a new vocal processing technique, and gave herself permission to pursue a pacing that felt intuitive, rather one that followed typical song structures. She walked around in the windiest season with a subwoofer backpack and an umbrella, listening to the low end of the album amidst 60mph gusts. She listened to herself, and, in doing so, to an inner community which suddenly opened to her. Underlying the album is a dynamic relationship between what Smith describes as six distinct voices, each a multifaceted storyteller. By acknowledging these characters, she was acknowledging her whole being: the woven plurality of self, the complex process of noticing and resolving inner conflicts, and the joy of finding harmony in flux. "I started to feel so embodied by all of these characters. This is all the felt, unsaid stuff [my inner community] wants to communicate but it doesn't have the English language as its form of communication, and so [this album was a form of] giving space to let it talk and not judge it and just let it play." By not adhering to expected song structures, each song feels even more like a conversation, with each character getting to express themselves in full.

"Art is awe, art is mystery expressed," writes Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. "Art is somatic, even if it is experienced cerebrally. It is felt." The central mysteries of Smith's ninth studio album, Let's Turn it Into Sound, have to do with perception, expression, and communication: How can we communicate when spoken language is inadequate? How do we understand what it is we're feeling? How do we translate our experience of the world into something that someone else can understand? For Smith, a self-described "feeler," the answers are inspired by compound words in non-English languages, translation, sculptural fashion, dance, butoh, wushu shaolin, and other forms of sensory and somatic experience. Just like fashion uses lines, shapes, colors, textures, and silhouettes to communicate on a sensual level separate from the conscious mind, Let's Turn it Into Sound strives to use sound to communicate what words alone cannot. "The album is a puzzle," Smith says. "[It] is a symbol of receiving a compound of a ton of feelings from going out into a situation, and the song titles are instructions to breaking apart the feelings and understanding them." The energized "Is it Me or is it You" comes from traversing the gaps between how you see yourself and how another might see you, through a filter of their own projections. The hushed sense of revelation that brackets "There is Something" refers to the feeling of walking into a room and being subconsciously aware of the dynamic present. All the while, Smith interprets these feelings through sound. This auditory interpretation process, driven by earnest curiosity, led Smith to record some thoughts and questions that popped up along the journey in Somatic Hearing_a booklet which accompanies the album. Over three frenzied months, recording alone in her home studio, Smith allowed herself to pursue new experiments to accompany her usual toolkit of modular, analogue, and rare synthesizers (including her signature Buchla), orchestral sounds, and the voice. She created a new vocal processing technique, and gave herself permission to pursue a pacing that felt intuitive, rather one that followed typical song structures. She walked around in the windiest season with a subwoofer backpack and an umbrella, listening to the low end of the album amidst 60mph gusts. She listened to herself, and, in doing so, to an inner community which suddenly opened to her. Underlying the album is a dynamic relationship between what Smith describes as six distinct voices, each a multifaceted storyteller. By acknowledging these characters, she was acknowledging her whole being: the woven plurality of self, the complex process of noticing and resolving inner conflicts, and the joy of finding harmony in flux. "I started to feel so embodied by all of these characters. This is all the felt, unsaid stuff [my inner community] wants to communicate but it doesn't have the English language as its form of communication, and so [this album was a form of] giving space to let it talk and not judge it and just let it play." By not adhering to expected song structures, each song feels even more like a conversation, with each character getting to express themselves in full.

Composer, performer, and producer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith's new album EARS is an immersive listening experience in which dizzying swirls of organic and synthesized sounds work together to create a sense of three-dimensional space and propulsion. Dense and carefully crafted, each of the songs on EARS unfolds with a fluid elegance, while maintaining a spontaneous energy, and a sprightly sense of discovery. Listeners familiar with her previous album Euclid (an album that prompted Dazed to call her “…one of the most pioneering musicians in the world.”) will no doubt notice her heavier use of vocals on EARS. On all but one song, her gently ecstatic swells of vocals emerge to soar over a dense jungle of synths and woodwinds.
Much of the album's warmth and energy stems from Smith's use of the versatile analog synthesizer, the Buchla Music Easel. According to Smith, “…nothing compares to the sound of a Buchla. In my mind a Buchla synthesizer has the most human sound in it. I wanted to show the Easel’s versatility and range of motion within a live set. I also wanted to spend as little time as possible in front of the computer during the creation.” After initially composing on the Buchla, she wrote arrangements for a woodwind quintet, added vocals, and further refined the pieces with granular synthesis techniques she developed in her sound design work (she contributed sound design to Panda Bear's “Boys Latin” video, and handled sound design and original compositions for Brasilia co-written by and starring Reggie Watts).
Though the pallet of sounds Smith employs on EARS is darker than the ebullient tenor we heard on Euclid, she's careful to let in just enough light to covey a feeling of cosmic bliss and transcendence. Kinetic arpeggios of synths pulse, often buoying her graceful vocal mantras, while woodwinds breathe and flutter, emulating the wildlife Smith observed while growing up on the West Coast (she even studied recordings of slowed down bird calls prior to composing these pieces). Though some of her gestures echo the musical tropes used by early minimalist composers, the world she creates on EARS is uniquely hypnotic and full of life, not unlike Miyzaki's film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which she cites as an inspiration.
EARS is a masterful articulation of Smith's vision, which she achieved in part by spending time preparing her mind prior to composing the album. As she explains, “I am very intentional about the months leading up to when I am going to compose something new. I really trust the subconscious and try and feed it only information I want it to feed back to me. I make playlists that I listen to nonstop, or have images I look at daily, or I go to places I want to be inspired by…I do all this prep work and then try and forget it when I am writing.” Listening to EARS, it's clear that her approach paid off, and that the seeds she planted within have born a vibrant and hyper-natural world that's as joyful to experience as the flora and fauna that inspired it.