Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith

many xps

terry riley's "rainbow in curved air" was the first thing Euclid reminded me of!! terry riley is a good comparison, and pastoral is a good word to describe it.

"the last track reminds me a bit of sasha and digweed"

ouch...

"terry riley is a good comparison"

the first person she mentions in this...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95UvPlhjbE4&nohtml5=False

I watched that. Didn't want to get all pedantic but Riley's not really known for Buchla. I mean, he was probably around the SF tape music center, but I dont' think I know of any recordings with synthesizers or a modular like that. Maybe that lifespan soundtrack or something. It's close enough though to make that connection I suppose!

awesome
xp

@NickB

you could mention laurie spiegel but her most famous works (ie. expanding universe era not say, obsolete systems) are more about automating and sequencing contrapuntal processes (ie. horizontal) to create music (ie. horizontal composition) with very little emphasis on synthesis really. where as this is just piling on the vertical layers.

i just think perhaps a few of the banners this is being heralded under seems to be misnomers for me (which possibly isn’t her fault). mainly the buchla/synth geek angle and the composition angle.

not really hearing anything that exciting sound-wise here? other than a few token buchla blats kind of gilding the frosting it doesn't really sound unlike a million other subtractive synth jams? (this could just be my problem with a lot of modern modular stuff though... that the end results don't rely take advantage of the format. people using this exotic interface and focusing so much on that aspect of it that they can't hear the kind of prosaic net result of what they're creating?)

watching this video it makes sense that she's from a guitar/folk/school background... i feel like there's a listening learning curve to being able to create interesting electronic music if you've come from another composition background. can't hear the forest for the trees almost and you end up bringing all this other baggage to what you're doing. which could be an interesting mutatnt viewpoint, but more often probably ends up as dilettante-ish.

but yeah, the modern composition angle (ie. NOTATED INSTRUMENTAL PARTS) (this-ain't-just-synth-jamming), jon hassell instrument treatments + arpeggiator for miles + cocteau twins obfuscated vocals +... just seems to be more just ticking of aesthetic boxes for me.

but like you say, it's very hard to say why something like this hits you. why do i love 70s roedelius when lots of that stuff is full of boring pentatonic arpeggios too? i'm just spouting (a lot of) hot air really.

i thought that video for fact was really coherent in its explanation of what she was doing with a modular set up and that seems incredibly rare.

i don't doubt she knows exactly what she's doing.

it's more... like an artist making a photo-realistic rendition of people's face with carefully-burnt toast or something. the process/craft being valued over the end result (ie. something you could take with a click of a shutter). is something relatively prosaic any better just because you took a convoluted route to the end result. again, not levelling it at her necessarily - more in a general sense for modu-lators in general.

i should've said xp – didn't mean it as a reply to your post, just to the posting of the video which is what made me listen to the album.

nonetheless, doesn't feel like aesthetic box ticking for me.

linee I get exactly what you're talking about, and it's funny, one of my earliest altercations on this board involved explaining horiz. vs. vert. composition and people screaming at me that I was stupid (but those descriptions are super useful imo!)

KAS is best, for me, when she's working just with the Music Easel bc it forces out her ingenuity with the thing, and yes with this record it does just become a layered dessert but insofar as Emeralds-y style Jenga music goes she's got the best sensibilities out there imo

Listened to this album off the back of the praise / descriptions in this thread, loved it, bought it, enthused about it to others in a manner not dissimilar to the start of this thread and now have one other person enthusing about the album in a manner not dissimilar to the start of the thread. Thanks to the enthusers!

Me too! A very bad hate thread made me listen to a couple minutes of "Existence in the Unfurling" youtube the day before yesterday. What I heard was so amazing that I immediately ordered ~vinyl~ copies of both EARS and Euclid and killed the video so as to more fully enjoy the Total Album Experience when they arrive.

Thanks, old ILX dickhole zing cru.

I didn't like the public shaming element of that thread but i like the idea of Divisive Albums where people passionately take sides, we could stand to have more of that on the board.

Sometimes it feels like there is so much a available music now, no one album seems to matter... Everyone has a "like it or leave it" approach, which is bad for criticism. If you can love something, you should be able to hate it... Idk this thread wasn't an instance of that but I like the idea of passions running high.

i don't think this album can bear the weight of serious divisiveness. it's just mostly pleasant + unoffensive which is obv what imago doesn't like about it - that it isn't challenging/difficult enough.

nah I just find the melodies completely uninteresting, which is enough to make me fairly passionately dislike something (if it's melodically-driven, which this is imo, as much as it is texturally-driven, and sure the textures are nice)

can't conceive of a non-pointed sense in which a melody can be interesting

I wonder how common an experience it is nowadays for an artist investigating what seems to be a sudden breakthrough of appreciation for her work and finding shitposting containment

I've only played it a few times. Thanks to this thread, I'm glad I checked it out. Some of the processed vocals early on bothered me a bit. That's a small point, and I think most of it is "good" I'm sure I'll play it again, but it might be too pretty and unthreatening to get the adrenaline flowing.

@ katherine, typically in the experiences of the people I know, the shitposts are all that are remembered, they blot out all the praise

In this case though not much of it is at the expense of the actual music or the musician.

also she's on tour with anco

o shit whiney's gonna have a field day with that

spending a tour with animal collective seems like it'd be a real drag/test of patience

Are you saying that for any reason beyond being subjected to their performances along the way?

the animal collective dudes always seemed very chill almost to the point of dullness

She might get bored and turn to the internet and find this thread...

...which is overwhelmingly positive, so hi Kaitlyn I enjoy your work

starting to prefer this over euclid now

"spending a tour with animal collective seems like it'd be a real drag/test of patience"

they make really good earplugs now.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TQkCGgIjrCA/UNs0KJpSeuI/AAAAAAAAAyU/yjeG91v5TCs/s1600/GuyGiantHeadphones.jpg

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

― bitcoin bajas (diamonddave85)

same. i've been listening to it obsessively the last few days and picked up the LP this afternoon. euclid rules too!

just to counterweight the jokes a lil idk if this is broadly true or politically meaningful but: anco support slot is p significant, i think, & has a p gd history; like i remember hearing grouper talk abt it being her first real show getting paid a living-artist-wage amount of money. i feel like i have seen good groups supporting at animal collective shows, & that KAS is maybe a smaller commodity commercially than whoever else they could've dragged along, so w2g AC for breaking up the Shitty Evening Of Support Band Industrial Complex & introducing everybody to cool spacey music

Credit to them for breaking up a Shitty Evening Of Animal Collective Music with something good as well.

they are good i think

Here's something that scratches a similar itch (but not nearly as good): https://waclawzimpel.bandcamp.com/album/lines

bought this record at the weekend thanks to the Whiney thread. It's pretty good so far!

and i know i keep banging on about it, but anyone who likes this should check out Girls In Airports as well.

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/pictures/45-best-albums-of-2016-so-far-20160620/kaitlyn-aurelia-smith-ears-20160617

Looking forward to this!

http://www.factmag.com/2016/06/28/kaitlyn-aurelia-smith-suzanne-ciani-frkwys/

Nice

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!