Description
Label Review.
2020 album. Electronic. Also available on CD.
Our Overview.
Los Angeles 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 Kaithlyn. 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.
As it has arrived, in a completed state, The Mosaic of Transformation is a holistic manifestation of embodied motions. Airy organ and voice interweave with burbling Buchla-spawned harmonic bubbles. If the record could be summarized in a single movement, it is the 10-minute closing suite, a rapturous collage called “Expanding Electricity.” Symphonic phrases establish the piece before washes of glittering electric peals and synthesized vibraphone helix into focus. Soon, Smith’s voice grounds it all with an intuitive vocal hook, harmonized and augmented by concentric spirals of harp-and-horn-like sounds. Smith’s music doesn’t capture a specific emotion as much as it captures the joys of possessing a body, and the ability to, with devotion and a steady open heart, maneuver that vessel in space by way of electricity to euphoric degrees.
Tracklisting: Unbraiding Boundless Energy Within Boundaries / Remembering / Understanding Body Messages / The Steady Heart / Carrying Gravity / The Spine Is Quiet In The Center / Overflowing / Deepening The Flow Of / Expanding Electricity