Bleep

Composer, artist, and producer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith returns to Ghostly International with her most ambitious, intuitive, and inviting work to date on her ninth album. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith has carved a unique space within the music world. Known for an all-encompassing approach to sound and lovingly embraced by the ambient and new age communities, the music she makes under own name is certainly indebted to postmodernist thought. But there’s an edge to her songwriting that reaches beyond the esotericism of the avant-garde, a desire to connect with audiences cerebrally as well as emotionally and physically. Let’s Turn It Into Sound is not a sudden turn to the dancefloor nor is it a radical reconstruction of her music in general, but rather a pointed refinement of the elements she has utilised before. A calculated blast of symphonic bliss meant to reach every synapse within the listener, a celebration of the senses and what it means to be a person within a space. Let’s Turn It Into Sound is baroque introspective pop built from electronics.

“Art is awe, art is mystery expressed,” says Aurelia Smith. “Art is somatic, even if it is experienced cerebrally. It is felt.” That sentiment is duly found within the album’s framework. Recorded in isolation at her home studio, it buzzes with an energy that seeks out compatibility. Using new vocal processing techniques alongside her army of modular, analogue and rare synthesisers to explore the multifaceted complexities of her being, finding harmony in the woven plurality of self.

The record opens with ‘Have You Felt Lately?’, a bustling piece of sound design that fakes out the listener with its video game side scroller aesthetic before segueing into elegiac electronic folk. The track finds a running mate in the equally inquisitive ‘Is It Me Or You?’ and its downtempo groove. Elsewhere Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith uses a chorus of her own voice on the complex and meteorological “Then the Wind Came’ before immediately following with ‘There is Something’, one of her most straightforward and dance oriented tracks to date. These twists and turns function as a symbol for the communal effect of music Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith laid out ahead of Let’s Turn It Into Sound. The ebbs and flows of our feelings are reflected in the ripples of sound.