Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith

seriously, I don't keep up with most new ilx threads, but I don't see how this record is particularly ILX-friendly. Maybe because the review compares it to Fever Ray/The Knife?

i think it's just ilx friendly bc it's good and ilm posters are suckers for good music

not feeling this album. there are some good synth sounds on it but a lot of unpleasant sounds too.

which thread is all this complaining happening on?

OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

http://cdn.fansided.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/229/files/2015/02/simpsons-pitchforks.jpg

fwiw i think this is p good but not standing out for me so far. i listen to a lot of music like this, it's nice but it's not blowing my mind.

The album is good

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Tuesday, April 5, 2016 12:19 PM (3 minutes ago)

Für lj - this is a staggering monument of artistic genius and musical magnificence. surely the greatest album of the year, if not the century. ten thumbs up - highly recommended!

We should just have "good"/"bad" polls from now on.

that's too absolutist. options should just be OK and eh

Is anyone else into Kara-lis Coverdale? I sort of group them together in my mind due to similarity of names, and KLC's music has more of an ecclesiastical Tim Hecker vibe but they both push the same emotional buttons for me.

(FYI if anyone is too much of a bottler to post on this entirely peaceable thread then their opinion basically doesn't exist and is irrelevant).

i like her colorful wires

this album sounds like aurelia smith traveled back to the garden of eden and captured the natural noises made by the birds of paradise soaring above lush fields and dense wet forests and two naked bodies listening, carefully, they embrace, moved by the music to tears and a sense of heavenly grace that can be shattered by nothing - not by snakes in the grass or fruit growing on trees. the album ends and they look at each other and wonder aloud how they can put on another album after this one.

this album is like breathing for the first time

i had never even seen a shooting star before.

25 years of rotations, passes through comets' paths, and travel, and to my memory I had never witnessed burning debris scratch across the night sky.

It's wonderful. Totally claustrophobic and warm and, yes, self-indulgent, but she is on a mission to prove she's more than a synth artist tinkling on some keyboards. Totally pulls it off in a dreamy, hazy, muffly way.

Also, I saw her play in an outdoor space in Silver Lake and everyone was just floored by the sincerity of it all. She is no joke.

Multiple xp to LG - I think this sounds like a lot of stuff that already exists but it excels at it.

I didn't think any of the posts in this thread were excessively effusive, but who wants to enjoy nice music when we can turn it into a clusterfuck of some kind

The experience and emotions tied to listening to Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith's Ears are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax.

sorry i'm just dicking around, i think lj is being a dork, and i love this album even if euclid is a little better

lol

this album (EARS) is aptly titled because I literally feel like I truly have been given a new pair of EARS and am listening to music for the first time in my life

looooooool

http://www.tmchoir.org/wp-content/uploads/NewEars.png

Is anyone else into Kara-lis Coverdale? I sort of group them together in my mind due to similarity of names, and KLC's music has more of an ecclesiastical Tim Hecker vibe but they both push the same emotional buttons for me.

yeah same, i thought the kara-lis coverdale & lxv album from last year was particularly nice. (apologies for the embarrassingly effusive praise)

i listen to a lot of music ~like this~ and this album initially seemed like just a fairly decent version of it but it's completely embedded itself in my life after a couple of months - it feels perfectly balanced between all its elements, there's always something happening so it's not just ambient mood and yet she never breaks the spell

really i only checked this out because of euclid placing in the ilm poll - i didn't love it (off the cursory listen i gave it) but it was interesting enough for me to give this some attention, am really glad i did and intend to return to her previous albums as soon as i can tear myself away from this

xp aftertouches was a v good walking around the city in the sunlight album, felt colder than KAS

k-l c is cool imo, will check out the artist mentioned on this thread

lex OTM. Sums up my feelings too. An album hasn't grabbed me like this, from start to finish as a singular entity, in a while. Maybe years. Hard not to continue gushing. And listening to it loud on a really nice stereo is quite something.

It really is quite good. Whiney is just trying to kill your buzz because that's who he is and what he duzz

JFC what did you people do to this thread.

got excited reading about this (thanks to this thread).

had a deep listen and pretty disappointed really... it's nice enough mood music but i'm not really hearing what separates this musically from the thousands of mid-late-00s synth stuff. a bit more measured sure, some woodwind in there and some 4th world 5ths pitchshifting...

just yer standard vertically-composed arp-scapes really? what are people hearing as being exciting about this

yeah that feels about right to me. i sometimes feel like ilm and maybe the wider world goes crazy for artists around the point where they are becoming less interesting. like julia holter felt the same.

i know that sounds like "oh their early stuff is better" - i mean sometimes an artist's sort of breakout album is some kind of middlepoint of note, but other times i just think the part that is making it appeal more seems to nullify whatever i liked in the first place. and here's why and that's okay.

anyway i am going to give this another listen.

just yer standard vertically-composed arp-scapes really? what are people hearing as being exciting about this

Sometimes it's difficult to explain why a vibe works but it this case it just does, just texturally and melodically really satisfying at the same time. I suppose it depends on what you hope to get from music like this - I don't listen to ambient because it's "interesting" (although that helps), it's entirely about the emotional effect for me.

The arp scapes comment kinda makes sense to me in that this is sort of the ambient equivalent of Lindstrom c. Smalhans, when what it's doing is sort of rudimentary but at the same time really works.

the last track reminds me a bit of sasha and digweed

sorry everyone

had a deep listen and pretty disappointed really... it's nice enough mood music but i'm not really hearing what separates this musically from the thousands of mid-late-00s synth stuff.

Hard to know who you think this sounds like without you naming names, but a lot of your 0PNs and your John Elliots seemed to be influenced a lot by German kosmische stuff, where as this feels more rooted in an American tradition of Terry Riley and Laurie Spiegel and David Borden, focussing on nature and our place in it rather than the cold vast distances of eternal space etc a la Klaus Schulze. Kind of the pastoral as opposed to the astral? An organic music society sort of thing, something to sow your biodynamic carrots to or whatever (I'm sure that is a perfectly horrible misrepresentation of all concerned, also profuse and humble apologies to whiney etc).

the mid-late-00s thing it reminded me of most was Mountains/Koen Holtkamp - not so much in the actual sounds but more the feeling of connection to the natural world

but then like you said, there's the vocal thing and the woodwinds which i guess are still a terry riley kind of deal, but give it a total other layer to your standard synthetic yoghurt weaving

i quite like this and all but it's so far off terry riley for me.

not saying it sounds like him, he just feels like maybe a spirit presiding over it.

the thing it brought to mind for me, not for specific sonic similarities but for the very organic, breathing synthworld she creates, was the VFTL album

It sounds a bit like some kind of american hauntology?

Maybe if you switch silent running for pendas fen

Well Ears is pretty pleasant, not sure if I'll ever feel the need to listen to it again but it was superficially nice. She doesn't seem to know how to end a track though, apart from the last track they all just kind of... stop abruptly. I'd probably prefer it if it was instrumental as well.

I do really like the last track though

Been listening to this a lot and like it very much, but definitely prefer Euclid. The jaunty pieces from side a of Euclid are still my favorite things I've heard from her. Really nice compositions that give me that Miyazaki vibe in a big way.

Rare Things Grow is my current favorite on EARS. The sax parts on that one are so nice.

this album is so dope, thanks 2 whiney for his thread cuz otherwise i wouldnt've clicked on this one

Wait, did Whiney actually say that he enjoyed music made by a woman

She’s playing a free show in a couple weeks at the museum where I work - in LA

https://hammer.ucla.edu/programs-events/2023/kaitlyn-aurelia-smith