The Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith

Acclaimed composer, artist, and producer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith returns to Ghostly International with Let’s Turn it Into Sound, her most ambitious, intuitive, and inviting work to date. Though ambient and modern new age circles have embraced Smith’s catalog, Let’s Turn it Into Sound favours a more baroque and robust form of avant-pop. The music bursts with vertiginous vocal harmonies and detailed sound design, forming a truly unique sonic vision.

On her most accessible album yet, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith draws out the organic qualities of her Buchla modular synth. But The Kid sparks a bodily pleasure alongside her music’s cerebral delights.

West coast 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.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith's first Ghostly International release, The Mosaic of Transformation, was inspired by electricity, and its relationship to the energy of the human body. The composer began a daily practice in which she would pass electricity through her body, setting it into motion. These improvisatory movements, which changed from day to day, fed into the creation of the album, an ever-shifting, multi-sensory mass of bubbling synths and cascading vocal arrangements. The record doesn't feel as structured and focused as The Kid, Smith's new age pop opus from 2017, but it's meant to be amorphous and fluid, and it follows its own current.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith's formative years were spent communing with nature on Orcas Island in the northwest region of Washington state, a place she describes as "one of the most magical and peaceful places I have ever been."
Electronic Series is an annual offering, and each volume will consist of a musical recording, accompanied by a short episodic comic about two friends - a plant and a human being - having an existential conversation. Each volume will focus on a different theme and context intended to nourish inquisitiveness. The theme of Volume 1 is "Abstractions" - based on a collection of works by filmmaker Harry Everett Smith.

Enhance your psychedelic mood with MOJO’s covermount CD: Bright Ambassadors Of Morning – a collection of mind-altering music from the past and present, featuring The Flaming Lips, James Holden, Phil Manzanera, Todd Rundgren, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and more.

Rough Trade presents “Behind the Counter with Max Richter“. This spectacular compilation put together by much-loved British composer Max Richter is the first in Rough Trade Shop’s Behind the Counter series, in which some of our favourite artists create mixes especially for us using the records we sell on the shop floor. As big fans of Max, Rough Trade invited him to curate a mix, knowing he would pick out some unexpected gems. The result is a 36-track (on CD) and 33-Track (On Vinyl) compilation of soundbites, pieces of composition, interesting mixes and curious musical choices including tracks from Mogwai, Boards of Canada, Philip Glass, Aphex Twin and Low among some classical works by Rachmaninoff and Bach.