Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith

So, I got Sunergy in the mail today, and it's pretty dope! It sounds less organic and more influenced by old school space music/synth jamming than KAS's previous albums, but being a big space music fan I like that! I wasn't familiar with Suzanne Ciani before, but based on her liner notes his been playing the Buchla since the 1970s, and I guess that's her hand showing with the more spacey stuff. It's not like proper cool/minimal '70s space music a la Tangerine Dream though, it gets more loopy and heavy, and occasionally the arpeggios even sound like they could be from Wechselspannung or some other downtempo electro album. No beats though, which is fine.

Time will tell, but on the first listen this may even be my favourite Smith album since Tides.

New interview up today if yr interested in the process (and how they got together):

http://thequietus.com/articles/20910-kaitlyn-aurelia-smith-suzanne-ciani-interview

The Ciani 'Invisible Jukebox' feature in the Sept 2016 issue of The Wire is also a good read (and very funny in places).

so I checked if this was up on Spotify and it isn't there yet, but they have added Suzanne Ciani's Buchla Concerts 1975 disc, which I'm checking out now:

https://open.spotify.com/album/5NeWznX1xhs9KzsNh5PZQT

nice catch, thx for sharing

A Bolinas concert would be amazing. Also, it would only be promoted via flyers posted at the bar and the general store, maybe a message written in the sand at low tide, and I'd never hear about it.

Yeah, the official release date is September 16th... I pre-ordered it via Bandcamp, and for some reason got the physical CD in mail yesterday already, even though you can't yet download the digital version on the Bandcamp page.

catching ciani tonight at roulette. finally a brooklyn modular show i can get excited about

Super psyched for Sunergy, I know I'm going to love it...

I've been listening to this more, and I really like the (apparently) improvised nature of the music, you never know where it's gonna go next. I mostly listen to ambient/space music informed by techno and house and other forms of dance music, but this seems to sidestep that lineage completely, possibly because Ciani predates it. So it's nicely unpredictable.

If you could make one complaint, it's that the soundworld on all three tracks is pretty samey, I guess because most of the music was done with the two Buchlas Smith and Ciani played. But it's a trippy world to dive into!

Man, I love the synth twitches on the first track starting around 14:45 minutes... Like aliens burping through 303s.

sweet video, looks like they had fun making this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5Xaw5r43n0

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/sep/16/don-buchla-modular-synthesizer-pioneer-dies-aged-79

https://twitter.com/kaitlynaurelia/status/776897971078045697

Nobody posted this yet apparently - limited release on a tape compilation from 2015, so it's understandable if it was missed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDzKWqqSTvs

Sunergy is on Spotify now, but for some reason searching by that title didn't show it: had to look for 'FRKWYS' instead

One spin in after getting this last night – and it's pretty much exactly what I wanted/expected, and that's a great thing. Love this.

this is wayyy more up my alley than the other KAS stuff.

great last night in london, when it got started...

(i think the support was a dj, but there was nothing to say that the special guest dj had taken over from the bloke playing records beforehand. so it just felt like we were being kept waiting for 2 hours, 200 of us crammed into a railway arch.)

she came on at 9:30, played for 50 minutes or so. not sure how much was sequenced or how much of it was improvised. seemed to be playing songs, short bits with vocals with some longer (better) bits in between.

Sounds pretty similar to her set in SF a couple weeks ago. Would love for her to just jam for an hour, but then I'm currently in love with Sunergy soooo

colorful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goegShPV3i0

Nice. Is this a leftover from the EARS sessions?

listening to Ears and it really is a great album

new album in October ya'll

o wow amazing news. caught her show at knockdown in brooklyn, one of the best live experiences i've had in a while. love her music.

radddddddd love her

Saw her in SF. She sold her swag directly from the stage after. Not ashamed to say I fell in love while handing her cash for a shirt. She's a really lovely person in addition to being an incredible musician.

cool 360 degree video of her studio:

https://www.facebook.com/redbull/videos/10158787001250352/

A cover of Sade's "By Your Side"? Sure, why not

https://kaitlynaureliasmith.bandcamp.com/track/by-your-side-sade-cover

Does that mean Jute Gyte is next for covering that song?

New album details/preorder

https://kaitlynaureliasmith.bandcamp.com/album/the-kid

Wow, vocals front and center for a change. Wonder if the whole album will go for a more traditional songwriting approach.

another new one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix9Kr5E7XdQ

Album is available to stream: http://www.npr.org/2017/09/28/553692113/first-listen-kaitlyn-aurelia-smith-the-kid?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=nprmusic&utm_term=music&utm_content=20170505

oh nice

wow wow wow wow

i'm halfway through and excited to listen to this many more times this year.

this is probably the worst possible way to frame this praise, but the ending stretch of "until i remember" is like the forgotten promise of early 2000s ~folktronica~ gradually emerging from behind the sun, like if planet X was actually real.

Super psyched, though EARS set a very high bar

she's great

I'll have to spend some more time with EARS. Didn't do all that much for me at the time but this new one sounds so playful and effortless. She does all these wonderful things like it's nbd

it takes everything i like about EARS and magnifies it, and then stretches it out.

dang, so good

i'm gonna hold off of any additional listens until the LPs arrive in the mail

this is probably the worst possible way to frame this praise, but the ending stretch of "until i remember" is like the forgotten promise of early 2000s ~folktronica~ gradually emerging from behind the sun, like if planet X was actually real.

― Karl Malone, Thursday, September 28, 2017 12:15 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i know what you mean, shit like Caribou and Four Tet? struggling to think of other examples but yeah "folktronica" was absolutely a thing & yes it was forgotten

oh hey, pretty clever what she's done with the tracklist

i know what you mean, shit like Caribou and Four Tet? struggling to think of other examples but yeah "folktronica" was absolutely a thing & yes it was forgotten

Tuung is always the band I think of when this label comes up, but I can't remember now how a single one of their songs goes.

haha oh yeah! i remember them. but yeah can't even remember a song title now

Can't decide if I should listen to this before the show in a couple weeks or not.

> forgotten promise of early 2000s ~folktronica

XP/OT: Really wish Pooka had further pursued some of their sounds from Shift (2001)

Which was a remix album by Brian Duffy? See also "Ovum", which is probably a better precursor to KAS, only with FM rather than analog synths.

My favorite syntho weirdos KAS and John Maus dropping albums in the same month? Love it.