Witnessing composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith at work with her rare Buchla 100 synthesiser has the same meditative effect as stargazing, or floating underwater. She makes worlds out of sleekly filtered vocals, glowing synths that bubble and build and beats that click and mutter like night creatures.
Trained at Berklee College of Music and then lured away from a rising folk duo by her fascination with analogue synths, Smith creates imagined soundtracks for the abstract visuals in her mind. All this inspired by her childhood on an island full of artists off the coast of Washington State, Hayao Miyazaki’s animations, neon sea creatures, YouTube videos of Indian gymnastics, 3D geometry, and the ways that natural sounds can be made to sound synthetic, and vice-versa.
