- Armed with homemade vocal processing and a new ear for bright, mischievous sounds, the synth wizard presents her weirdest, most vibrant work yet.
- Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith is one of a long line of artists who use the alchemical magic of the synthesizer to express feelings, sounds and ideas that cannot exist in the unplugged world. What sets her apart is how Smith has always used the rest of her body, from her voice to yoga-like movements and dancing, to augment the synthesizer work. That includes the Animal Collective-style vocalizations on her breakthrough album, EARS, or the motion capture video for the first single from her new LP, Let's Turn It Into Sound, whose playful title captures both its mood and approach.
Let's Turn It Into Sound builds on Smith's last album, The Mosaic Of Transformation, a gorgeous yet somewhat hippy-dippy affair where she attempted to translate bodily poses into sound. Where that one was calm and meditative, Let's Turn It Into Sound overflows with energy and ideas, switching gears three to four times each track as her voice takes on inhuman qualities. She rides unusual melodic scales with all the glee of a child playing glissandos on a new keyboard.
This time, Smith attempted emotional stretches instead of physical ones. She wanted to channel feelings and ideas that don't come across easily in language, translating them through sound and texture instead. Perhaps ironically, Let's Turn It Into Sound is also Smith's wordiest, though many of the lyrics are obscured by intense, purpose-made vocal processing, floating in front of a swirl of brass, synths and woodwinds.
The songwriting is Smith's most ambitious and frantic, with the most serene passages cutting off before launching into another style entirely. Album closer and highlight "Give To The Water" is a good example, beginning with Caroline Polachek-style vocal acrobatics before a floaty section of accordion synths, eventually settling on a burbling outro where all the textures sound and feel like melting plastic. Then it just ends, leaving an empty but pleasant air, like perfuming lingering after someone walks by.
The opener "Have You Felt Lately" is just as wonderfully chaotic, starting with a gentle groove before transitioning into flowy ambient, then hardening into IDM-infused breakcore for its surprise ending. It's both whimsical and dense, as Smith pulls the listener along all the twists and turns of her internal monologue.
This is the conundrum at the heart of her latest effort: in developing these showcases for abstract feelings (even going as far as creating what she calls "characters" to express them), Smith's emotional tenor varies from ecstatic to frustratingly obtuse. The jaunty saxophone of "Locate" and its rollicking beat underlines the LP's best qualities, and "Unbraid: The Merge" has an emotional arc that ends with some of the record's most beautiful synth work, a callback to past records. But then there are songs like "Let It Fall," a flurry of near-spoken vocals whose meaning is inscrutable and melody even harder to follow. These cuts add a fizzy energy to the LP, but they also contribute to its jerky, stop-start flow.
With slightly more judicious editing, Let's Turn It Into Sound could have been a grand crossover statement, combining admittedly trendy synth experiments with freak-folk charisma. But that's not what Smith is going for here. Instead, the LP feels like listening to someone try out a new talent, learning as they go along, substituting practiced polish with a hunger for new ideas and self-expression. It's about the joy of tinkering around with new sounds, of hearing your voice eaten up and spat back out, nearly unrecognizable, by something of your own creation. So much of Smith's past work, in its epic sweep, has captured emotions at the macro level. Let's Turn It In zeroes in on those little feelings and thoughts that torment or delight the mind, until the point that every every song seems to veer off into three new directions every time you've wrapped your head around the current one.
Tracklist01. Have You Felt Lately?
02. Locate
03. Let It Fall
04. Is It Me Or Is It You?
05. Check Your Translation
06. Pivot Signal
07. Unbraid: The Merge
08. Then The Wind Came
09. There Is Something
10. Give To The Water