Let's Turn It Into Sound
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith is known for making meditative music—sometimes literally, in the case of her early album *Tides: Music for Meditation and Yoga*. But on *Let’s Turn It Into Sound*, the California synthesist takes a hard left, pressing pause on her most placid instincts and letting her playfulness take the reins. Though she continues to work with her beloved Buchla modular synthesizer, much of the album’s palette is built around her own voice, which she has distilled into gaseous pads and virtual choirs. But the most surprising development here might be the album’s focus on beats. The opening “Have You Felt Lately?” begins with an ambient invocation but quickly careens into bumpy, almost chaotic drum programming reminiscent of early-2000s IDM. “Locate” pairs squawking saxophone with a rollicking hip-house mutation, and both “Is it Me or is it You?” and “Unbraid: The Merge” evolve from lush arpeggios into surprisingly muscular dance grooves. It’s a bold new approach for Smith: an architectural sense of structure that makes the billowing motions of her bulbous, shape-shifting tones only that much more dynamic.
With tangled, stop-start arrangements that open to unexpected trap doors, the composer and synthesizer musician brings playfulness to the fore. You might call this her “pop” album.
Kinetic and unpredictable, this idea-packed collection provides an evolution from the ambient, new age music Smith has become known for.
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Let's Turn It Into Sound by Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: the artist is very excited about her new record, and we think it's *quite* good
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith has created a mirror of our tumultuous modern world in Let's Turn It Into Sound where we can see our faults and boundless possibilities.
While tracks frequently change tempo, key and mood, and discordant elements overlap, occasionally the cacophony sounds sublime