Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith

touring and playing Dublin next month!

A new thing.

https://kaitlynaureliasmith.bandcamp.com/album/electronic-series-vol-1-abstractions

I listened to it late last night. It seemed likeable as a long improvisation, maybe not worth $10?

My students mostly seem to think she's crazy for working with Buchla synths instead of a laptop in the 21st century.

Yes, definitely one to stream now and then, rather than buy. The cartoon sounds about two thirds of the way through injected some nice levity.

Listening to it now (and I bought it anyway) -- it's fun!

Not sure if this has been linked already, she has a monthly radio show on nts - https://www.nts.live/shows/kaitlyn-aurelia-smith

sounds nice would be cool if the tape came with some succulents

Radio show starting up now, checking it out.

cool!

Good stuff, pretty eclectic.

She’s so lucky to have inherited a buchla from a neighbour. That’s insane. Also living on orca island - damn

https://crackmagazine.net/2018/08/listen-to-a-new-ambient-track-kaitlyn-aurelia-smith-created-using-field-recordings-from-a-mountain-hike-in-los-angeles/

unusually informative URL
thanks!

https://kaitlynaureliasmith.bandcamp.com/album/tides-music-for-meditation-and-yoga

I wonder if that's just a vinyl/digital reissue of the original Waves? I love it to death, but I don't see the point of listening to ambient music on vinyl, and obviously I don't need to buy the digital version twice. It seems to be lacking the final track ("Tides X") of the original release, so maybe it's been reworked in some way?

New album on Ghostly International in May.

Teaser track, "Expanding Electricity":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-fBFJ6KuM4

Press blurb extract:

West coast composer, artist, and producer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith has chartered a pioneering career with multiple critically-acclaimed albums since 2015. Following the release of The Kid in 2017, Smith focused her energy in several directions. She founded Touchtheplants, a multidisciplinary creative environment for projects including the first volumes in her instrumental Electronic Series and pocket-sized poetry books on the practice of listening within. She's continued to explore the endless possibilities of electronic instruments as well as the shapes, movements, and expressions found in the physical body's relationship to sound and color. It is this life-guiding interest that forms the foundational frequencies of her latest full-length, The Mosaic of Transformation, a bright, sensorial glide through unbound wave phenomena and the radiant power discovered within oneself.

"I guess in one sentence, this album is my expression of love and appreciation for electricity," says Smith. While writing and recording, she embraced a daily practice of physical movement, passing electricity through her body and into motion, in ways reflecting her audio practice, which sends currents through modular synthesizers and into the air through speakers. Not a dancer by any traditional definition, she taught herself improvisatory movement realizing flexibility, strength, and unexpectedly, what Smith calls “a visual language” (the term was introduced to her by filmmaker Sean Hellfritsch) stemming from the human body and comprised of vibrational shapes. Understood as cymatics, as she says, "as a reference for how frequencies can be visualized," much like a mosaic.

Smith describes her first encounters with this mosaic; "the inspiration came to me in a sudden bubble of joy. It was accompanied by a multitude of shapes that were moving seamlessly from one into the other...My movement practice has been a constant transformation piece by piece. I made this album in the same way. Every day I would transform what I did yesterday...into something else. This album has gone through about 12 different versions of itself." As it has arrived, in a completed state, The Mosaic of Transformation is a holistic manifestation of embodied motions. Smith's signature textural curiosity that fans have grown to adore pivots naturally into a proprioceptive study of melody and timbre. Airy organ and voice interweave with burbling Buchla-spawned harmonic bubbles.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ES6qKBxWsAAdLRe?format=jpg&name=small

*reads blurb*

*stocks up on rotten tomatoes*

I'm sure you did the stocking up proprioceptively.

tbf now i'm on lockdown my flat is now also a 'multidisciplinary creative environment'

hurling the rotten tomatoes will probably qualify as a 'holistic manifestation of embodied motions' though

Nice, pretty psyched to add this to the collection

I love her music and I'm woo-woo as fuck so I can't wait for this

I know certain posters are docking her coolness points or whatever, but I like that she is true to herself and her own idiosyncratic weirdness.

It makes a lot of sense if you;ve seen her live.

She emanates L.A./west coast New Ageness both in her music and her promos too now haha. Probably has some crystals next to her synths or something, but still love her to death

Shes from and lives on orcas island in the san juans, no? Peak west coast crystal vibe zone

still a shocking album cover regardless of her vibe

she should tour with Marianne williamson

or score a love prayer

what's the matter with peace love and understanding

sayin

https://kaitlynaureliasmith.bandcamp.com/album/the-mosaic-of-transformation

Enjoying the new album

It's a bit more chill and vocal focus. Feels like a return to the direction she took on Euclid.

I am very into this, so dreamy

So, apparently she’s an anti-vaxxer too? Bummed to find out that facet. I don’t mind the crystal vibe zone aspect of her personality, but this puts her work in a whole new, unfortunately, less charitable view for me.

lj warned us back in 2017.

Ah fuck, really? Where did she air these views?

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith did an AMA yesterday and didn't answer a question about her apparently being an anti-vaxxer. This all sucks, obviously, but something I didn't expect is that I'd now begin to view her musical endeavors as some sort of grift. pic.twitter.com/0GqQ3Bbnl2

— Joshua Minsoo Kim (@misterminsoo) May 20, 2020

the new age movement has always involved a lot of grift, didn't help that the skeptical community turned out to be raging jackasses

Zappa to thread.

She makes vaguely new age music? Its going to come with the territory

Wholly unsurprising, but yeah I think it's ok to enjoy the music that comes out of being a crystal-brain yogahead

"I'd now begin to view her musical endeavours as some sort of a grift"

Hassling an established micro-celebrity about a viewpoint that they've expressed via a single Instagram story is full-tilt narcissistic abuse. I read that AMA yesterday and I hope that everybody's next favourite band is a cliff and they all dive right in

Not saying anti-vaxxers aren't the worst, they are, but ffs when is this shit gonna abate

I agree - and good for her getting paid for selling music to that app she isn’t complicit in some terrible sin bc she wants to make a living from her music

thirded

I think it's ok to enjoy the music that comes out of being a crystal-brain yogahead

Of course it is! And, if you think about it, accusations of grift don't make sense. It would be more suspicious if she wasn't an anti-vaxxer

FWIW being a “crystal brain yogahead” is totally fine and also a far cry from pushing dangerous anti-science bullshit. The AMA dodge doesn’t bother me, it’s the straight up anti-vaxx propaganda she posted on IG that rubs me the wrong way. Conflating being into yoga and crystals with being dangerously anti-science is also fucking stupid.

For the record, I’m not co-signing the “grifter” accusation, that’s weird to single her out for getting paid through teaming up with an app. She’s hardly the first musician to do so.

Thats also fine!

People are going to have different levels about what they cancel artists over. This one is hardly a surprise though

The grifter argument is probably more about expectation that an artist be a certain sort of person and when it turns out they might not be quite that, the gap between expectation and reality can't be resolved for some