Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith – Let’s Turn It Into Sound

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith is much appreciated by thousands of music lovers. That won’t change with the release of her tenth studio album, “Let’s Turn Into Sound”.  Because she represents for them a beautiful hybrid of “augmented songs” and adventurous approaches, the West Coast artist realtes to an appealing niche.  We like her work for its exploratory signature on the textural side with a predominantly electronic feel, for its use of Buchla modular synthesizers, for its rhythmic shifts, but also for its melodic qualities and its great harmonic sensitivity. The lush gardens of this composer, producer and performer are never austere, and she is very close to the movement of bodies – as we could observe in the excellent album “The Mosaic of Transformation” (2020). She does not evolve in the virile rhythmic, although it can sometimes suggest sought and complex patterns. Different cultures and genres intersect here: American minimalism, European electroacoustic, electronic isynth pop for video games, ambient, new age, dream pop are the main colors of this sensual and nourishing art form. Some sequences, however, require more listening, given the deliberate breaks in the sound narrative – sudden stop of a phrase, change of course, false track, rapid succession of short tableaux, etc.  Nevertheless, “Let’s Turn It Into Sound” proves to be the most accessible of her discography, without feeling an impoverishment of the active substances of her work.