Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith
Let's Turn It Into Sound
Ghostly International
/
2022
LP
23.99/25.99
GI-406 / Includes Download Code
Incl. VAT plus shipping / Orders from outside the EU are exempt from VAT
Tracklist
1Have You Felt Lately
2Locate
3Let it Fall
4Is it Me or is it You
5Check Your Translation
6Pivot Signal
7Unbraid The Merge
8Then the Wind Came
9There is Something
10Give to the Water

The central mysteries of Smith’s ninth studio album, »Let’s Turn It Into Sound«, have to do with perception, expression, and communication: How can we communicate when spoken language is inadequate? How do we understand what it is we’re feeling? How do we translate our experience of the world into something that someone else can understand?

For Smith, a self-described “feeler,” the answers are inspired by compound words in non-English languages, translation, sculptural fashion, dance, butoh, wushu shaolin, and other forms of sensory and somatic experience. Just like fashion uses lines, shapes, colors, textures, and silhouettes to communicate on a sensual level separate from the conscious mind, Let’s Turn it Into Sound strives to use sound to communicate what words alone cannot.

Over three frenzied months, recording alone in her home studio, Smith allowed herself to pursue new experiments to accompany her usual toolkit of modular, analogue, and rare synthesizers (including her signature Buchla), orchestral sounds, and the voice. She created a new vocal processing technique, and gave herself permission to pursue a pacing that felt intuitive, rather one that followed typical song structures. She walked around in the windiest season with a subwoofer backpack and an umbrella, listening to the low end of the album amidst 60mph gusts. She listened to herself, and, in doing so, to an inner community which suddenly opened to her.

Underlying the album is a dynamic relationship between what Smith describes as six distinct voices, each a multifaceted storyteller.

Smith has never fit neatly into the ambient genre conversation she’s most often associated with, and here she forges even further outside of it, traversing avant-garde pop, neoclassical, and the otherwise unclassifiable. The result is a playful, inquisitive, excitable work which appeals to us as social, sensitive animals, and invites listeners into a wholly idiosyncratic world that is both experimental, and, feels like the most human thing in the world. Proceeding through Let’s Turn it Into Sound is like peeking into a secret realm: one that delights both in the discovery of the magic hidden in the everyday, and the shimmer that lingers long after the portal itself shuts.