Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith
directors' cut, Village Voice, 2017
by Simon Reynolds
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s wondrous new album The Kid was hatched in a sound-garden attached to her home in Glendale, CA. A compact chamber that appears to be a converted
garage, the studio is crammed with vintage analogue synthesizers. There’s a
Prophet 5 and a Eurorack, but the pride of place goes to a Buchla, the modular
synth that first sparked her passion for electronic sounds.
Alongside technology, the room teems with vegetation. Smith
has often talked about how her creative process requires the presence of “a
plant nearby”. Look closer, though, and the tendrils of ivy strewn everywhere
turn out to be plastic. So are the plants in little hanging pots.” I’ve tried
to put real plants in here,” sighs Smith. “I even tried pretending I have this ‘pet
plant’ that goes everywhere with me and I’d bring it in here from outside. But
plants just don’t like it in here.” Her
other artistic prerequisite, natural light, is also poorly supplied by the
near- windowless space. So Smith came up with ersatz solutions: fairy lights
pulse through a translucent sheet tacked to the ceiling, while foot-level bulbs
flicker, creating an effect like light reflecting off water.
Look in the Dictionary and the opposite of “synthetic” is
“of natural origin”. All plastic and wires, synthesizers seem about as far as
you can get from the organic. But Smith
has a different view, preferring to see synths as just as Gaia-given as a
redwood or a pond full of terrapins.
Using a machine like the Buchla, she’s always felt “like I’m getting
this rare opportunity to sculpt electricity”. And electricity, she points out,
is a natural phenomenon, from the messages flickering through our nervous
systems to the lightning sparked by the colliding of clouds. Waxing a little
mystical, Smith enthuses about the way her synths run on alternating current:
“With A/C, there already is that breathing feeling – you feel that there’s life in there.” She returns to this idea when specifically
exalting the Buchla’s operational mode, which lets the user “set up all these
environments for unpredictability and movement... It makes things have a lot of
life.”
Surrounded by living things is how Smith grew up. She was
raised on Orcas, one of the San Juan islands in the Puget Sound. The place sounds like an ecotopian idyll.
Thanks to the rainy Pacific North West climate there’s moss everywhere and the
place teems with livestock and wild critters. Every year the main village of
Eastsound elects an animal as Mayor. The current officeholder is an actual
orca, a killer whale called Granny. Usually it’s a dog, like a blind golden
retriever who previously held the position.
That all sounds a teensy bit hippie, but that word makes Smith frown slightly.
She prefers to characterize the
inhabitants of Orcas as “people with a deep appreciation for Nature.”
Her music as much a form of cultivation as an intervention
in culture, Smith is rather like a hybrid blend of the two main professions on
Orcas: agrarians and artists. “I grew up
working on a farm. I also worked at a raw goat dairy. And there were always
horses around. Living in LA is the first
time I’ve not had that thing of there being a connection at all times to a
living thing.“ As a young adult, Smith became involved in homesteading, a
hardcore form of do-it-yourself in which you hand-make everything you need in life.
“I was learning how to hunt and how to tan the hides. Learning how to
store my food for the winter.” Smith even went as far trying to make her own
pencils. “You get a stick and melt lead
and pour it down – it’s so time-consuming!” Smith also abandoned money, relying
instead on barter. “I would go to the doctor and say ‘I’ll give you this round
of cheese I’ve made in exchange for a check-up”, she recalls. “The work/trade
thing worked for a whole year. And that’s one of my happiest memories, that
time – I was learning so many new things I just felt overwhelmed with joy. I
was in love with that existence”.
The homesteading phase coincided precisely with the period
when she was introduced by an Orcas neighbor to the Buchla. That opened up a different kind of
do-it-yourself - electronic daubs and
sound-molding – which bore fruit with early Bandcamp releases like Cows Will Eat The Weeds and Useful Trees. As the titles
indicate, these were direct responses to
her surroundings, what she could see out of her windows. Then came Tides,
Euclid and last year’s EARS, by which point she was getting
some serious critical acclaim. Partly
picking up on the prompts of titles like “Wetlands”, “Rare Things Grow” and “Existence
in the Unfurling” and partly responding to the succulent panoply of her
textures, the reviews have tended to be
be profuse with imagery of flora and foliage. Even if you’re unaware of her
backstory, by themselves Smith’s sounds suggest real-world analogues such as
bird-song, bubbling springs, undergrowth rustling with small creatures.
In interviews, Smith has talked about how she has no
interest in making the kind of forbiddingly abstract electronic music that fills
the mind’s eye with images of cold inhospitable regions of outer space. Her music is terrestrial; these electronics
are fully Earthed. So instead of
stark angularity, Smith emulates Nature’s
undulating ornamentalism, its baroque
splendor of curlicues and folds. “It’s
what just comes out,” she says,
attributing it partly to a near-synesthetic sensitivity to sound. “Music and
sounds can change your whole mood, your environment, the atmosphere in your house
– I feel very sensitive to that and I want to make music that makes someone
else’s environment feel alive and enjoyable to be in.”
Along with the lush fecundity and spongey intricacy of
natural ecosystems like marshlands, Smith’s music can also make the listener
imagine a children’s play environment: an inflatable bouncy castle, or a
kindergarten flooded with iridescent bubble-bath foam. These two tendencies –
the enchantment of all things that flourish and that frolic - converge on The Kid. It’s a concept album that
tracks an individual life across four stages from birth to death. On the vinyl
version, each phase corresponds to one side of the double LP. There’s a faintly
New Age aura to the project. Profuse with “I”’s, many of the titles
resembles affirmations or promises-to-self (“I Am Curious, I Care” , “I Will Make Room
For You”, “ I Am Learning”) while others
suggest abundance-consciousness or present-mindedness (“Who I Am And Why I Am
Where I Am”). Actually, says Smith, the titles are meant to be read downwards,
“like a poem”. And as well as a
celebration of life in general, the album is a celebration of a particular, and
particularly dear, life now lost.
“Through growing up farming and being close to the life
cycle,” explains Smith, an awareness of life and mortality “has always been on
my mind. But when I lost this person, it
was a big slap of that, and it kind
of burst with this really intense urgency in me to not waste a moment. Since
then there’s been a constant
reorganizing and figuring out of what I want to do with my time. Every night I
try and reflect on how I spent the day – how much on things I enjoy and how
much on obligations and commitments.” The overall message of The Kid – communicated as much by the inventive
buoyancy of the music as by the words, which are mostly indistinct on account
of Smith’s love of processing her own vocals to sound like a multitude – is the
importance of never losing your spirit of play, the child spark within. “The
biggest thing I learned from all of this is realizing that I want to play –
that’s a really big part of who I am, and it was also a real big part of the
person I lost. So I really wanted to just encapsulate that playful energy and
put it in other people’s environments, if they want it.”
As well as the up-close brush with mortality and transience,
another influence on The Kid was
reading the composer Henry Cowell’s 1930 book New Musical Resources, which tracks the history of human hearing in
terms of our evolving ability to cope with dissonance. “It’s kind of mildly boring,” laughs Smith,
“because it was written such a long time ago in this somewhat clinical style.
But the content is fascinating and it really turned my wheels in terms of
thinking about where are we at now, in terms of the evolution of our hearing.
We’re totally fine now with atonality, there isn’t really a shocking interval
anymore of the kind that once caused riots in audiences, like with Stravinsky.”
Thinking about what the new cutting edge might be in terms
of what would be viscerally upsetting to
the average listener, Smith decided it might involve simultaneity and
stereophony: the audio equivalent of Bowie’s alien character in The Man Who Fell To Earth, who is so
advanced he can watch a dozen TV channels at the same time. “One of my favorite things to play with when I’m in a group of people is
listening to multiple conversations at once and really trying to hold onto each
one. So on The Kid I’m really playing with the left and right channels.
Because so many people listen to music on headphones now. I had to keep rewriting the music so many
times in the beginning because it just sounded annoying!”
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith has zero interest in annoying the
listener, of course, or otherwise subjecting them to an extreme and testing
experience. The term “avant-garde” came from the military originally and still
retains an aura of ruthlessness, envisioning artistic innovation in terms of
ambushes on middlebrow sensibility and daring maneuvers that outflank bourgeois
complacency. Smith’s approach could not
be more different. She uses the phrase “comfort and novelty” to describe the
inspiration she gleaned from her discovery of minimalist composers like Terry
Riley and Steve Reich: the way their rippling patterns gently propel the
listener ever forward, as opposed to the
terrifying leaps into the abstract unknown proposed by other forms of
experimental music.
Smith’s project in fact is all about naturalising the
unfamiliar (electronic sounds) while also bending the known a little out of
shape. Another fresh development with The Kid is that where she has in the
past made synths sound “organic”, much of the new record involves her taking
so-called natural instruments like bassoon and cello and making them sound like
synths. One focus of these experiments was the trumpet, a sound she’s always
found grating. Smith decided to conquer that aversion, which required making
the trumpet sound unlike itself: softening
its stabbing attack, muting its vaguely military, bugel-like peal. “There was a
lot of blending. Sending it through the synth and breaking up the harmonics to
slightly delay them, so that the trumpet sound has a softer onset.” Smith adds,
“Whatever I’m frightened of or I’m bad at, I love stepping closer to that to
see what’s there.”