Electronic Composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith Is Humbled By The Natural World On ‘The Kid’

I was lucky enough to see Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith perform to a small audience earlier this year at the National Music Centre in Calgary, Alberta. The LA-based experimental analog synth artist was a resident there for a few days during the Sled Island music festival, taking advantage of the centre’s extensive synth collection and recording studios. During her performance she demoed some of the new work that she had been developing during her stay, and took particular joy out of showing off one of the weirder curios at the exhibit, a pipe organ that could be programmed with MIDI files.

The smile on her face as the pipe organ played a MIDI she’d written said it all. An antiquated instrument controlled digitally opens up a whole new way for her to synthesize sound. That dichotomy between the analog and the digital has been a focal point of Smith’s work as a musician, and it’s fair to say that she revels in moments where she can blur the line between the two. Her latest album, The Kid, distorts that difference even further by couching her synth odysseys in the sounds of the natural world.

Smith’s breakout album, 2016’s EARS, was a free-flowing, bubbling primordial soup of vibrant sound. Performed mostly on her Buchla Music Easel, each song had a warmth to it, bearing no affinity with the cold, precise movements usually associated with electronic and synthesizer music. Conversely, Smith treated and layered her own voice to almost indistinguishable levels, giving it an otherworldly, elemental presence on the record. In her music what’s electronic is made organic and visa versa, melding both into a unique sound that’s familiar and alien at the same time.

But the real takeaway from seeing her perform back in June was just how vast her music felt in the room. The National Music Centre is a beautiful building with great acoustics, and the sheer size of her songs in that space really made the room feel like the cathedral of sound it was meant to be. It would make sense, then, why Smith would find the MIDI pipe organ so appealing; not only does it help her combine the digital and analog realms, but the instrument’s history is deeply rooted in spiritual music, of which she is also a kind of practitioner.

If there’s a thematic throughline between EARS and The Kid it’s how Smith uses the blending of digital and analog as a means to convey her reverence for the natural world. If music is the gateway to the spiritual world then nature is her church.

Pay a visit to her Instagram and you’ll find shots and clips of vast vistas, rolling tides and thick mosses growing alongside riverbeds — seeing the world through her eyes, or at the very least, how she wants you to see it. Save for a few personal shots, there’s rarely ever another person in the frame in these photos. The focus is often on untouched natural wonders.

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The music on The Kid evokes these environments, with the opening instrumental track “I Am A Thought” beginning with rippling melodic hums and sighs, conjured whistles that ring out like birdsong, and trilling croaks that easily pass for amphibian. That intro lays the groundwork for the entire record which gushes with this same life force. On “A Kid” it takes the form of a rolling dancey shuffle, and on the similarly uptempo “Until I Remember” a synth melody is punctuated by water droplets and tweeting melodies.

The evocation of sounds found in nature in her songs isn’t window-dressing, it has a purpose revealed through Smith’s own lyrics. On “An Intention” she sings the celestial refrain “I feel everything at the same time,” suggesting that there’s a communion between herself and the rest of the universe, the cornerstone of the album’s expression of spirituality that’s reinforced by the artwork on its sleeve.

Depicting Smith covered in glitter in front of a backdrop of bright stars and swirling solar systems, the line on the artwork where she ends and the universe begins is barely discernible. Her facial expression hints she’s at peace, suggesting harmony between the foreground and background. It’s all very Zen.

The album’s tracklist echoes that same idea, unfolding like a mantra or a guiding principle when you read them one after the other: “I Am A Thought”; “An Intention”; “A Kid”; “In The World”; “I’m Consumed”; “In The World But Not Of The World”; “I Am Learning”; “To Follow And Lead”; “Until I Remember”; “Who I Am & Why I Am Where I Am”; “I Am Curious, I Care”; “I Will Make Room For You”; “To Feel Your Best.”

Like the Zen teachings which encourage people to forgo their ego in order to feel more connected to the world rather than separate from it, the persistence of nature within The Kid has the same humbling power. Just like a giant sycamore tree, or the vastness of the universe, music has the power to make us feel very small. Smith hones in on that humbling feeling on this record, highlighting it as the key to her own reverence for and communion with something much bigger than herself.

The Kid is out on 10/6 via Western Vinyl. Get it here.

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