Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith draws stories of love and flirtation from everyday objects and structures. Her commitment to finding “genius of everything” activates each sense to create an immersive listening experience. Her new album, GUSH, is due August 22nd via Nettwerk.

Northern Transmissions: What was your musical education and development and what was your entry point to electronic music?

KAITLYN AURELIA SMITH: I studied sound engineering in college. When I first went to college, I was studying classical guitar and wanted to be an orchestrator and conductor. Then I got an intuitive feeling that I really needed to know how to record myself, so I switched my major to sound engineering.

When I left college, It really just happened by chance that synthesizers started appearing in my world. This was around 2010, just before synths got really popular again. They weren’t around me before. A neighbor who used to teach at NYU in the electronic music department lent me a synthesizer. Then I would find residences or old universities with unused equipment, and then it snowballed from there.

NT: Your synth of choice is the Buchla modular synth. Can you just talk a little bit about what that is and why it’s so important to you?

KAS: It was the first synthesizer I ever interacted with, so it really shaped my understanding of electronic music and its additive synthesis. That form of synthesis really resonated with me coming from an orchestral and sound engineering background.

In classical music, learning to compose with the Harmonic series was something I was really familiar with. Additive synthesis plays with the Harmonic series and now I use a lot of different tools, but I gravitate back towards additive synthesis, maybe just out of familiarity.

NT: What is the music scene like where you grew up?

KAS: I grew up in the San Juan Islands in Washington. The scene there isn’t a scene in the traditional sense. It’s a different type of music scene. It didn’t influence me too much, but growing up on the islands gave me a lot of creative space.

I did a lot of mentorships with film composers because I’d go between the island and Southern California, where I’d find different engineers to shadow and mentor me. Pre-college, that introduced me to more of a professional music scene.

NT: Can you describe your synesthesia? How do you think it’s an asset?

KAS: I love this question! This is my favorite thing ever to talk about. It’s a cross between my feeling center and sound. Someone could say a word and it’ll create this whole feeling in me, like a bouncy ball just fell out of their mouth, and I have to go catch it. Then I’m feeling for the bouncy ball because it’s separated from its person.

It’s a lot of empathy for scenarios that are triggered from sounds and now it’s channeled into creativity. It’s become my day-to-day playful inner environment. It makes for a really enjoyable experience when I’m creating. My synesthesia makes me wanna make a lot of stuff, because it’s so stimulating; there’s so many feelings associated with it. In the past, it used to manifest as a really large gradient of feelings in all directions, which was overwhelming. Now I have a pretty good filter on it when I’m creating and can be very objective with it.

NT: What sounds trigger what physical experiences or sensations?

KAS: It’s always so different. I went to music school and was around so much sound, so I learned how to not hear things too. There are certain sounds that gave me a certain feeling in the beginning, but now I turn it off because I’m always around it.

For example, we have a dehumidifier in our house that goes off a few different times throughout the day. If it’s like a simple sound, it’s just a visual, a motion and a texture. Sometimes sounds and sensations are super particular to a resonating body.

That’s why I think I gave that example of someone saying a certain word and it’ll feel like a bouncy ball fell out of their mouth. That one is a sound in a resonating body. The way it’s interacting with that body is what really triggers it.

NT: Gush is largely inspired by the relationship between objects, their settings, and the emotions they conjure. What objects provided the most comfort and inspiration while writing Gush?

KAS: It first started with lecithins. You know how when you soak chia seeds, they get that little force field around them? That’s a lecithin. It’s a clear translucent thing that gets activated when water interacts with it.

It moved into all translucent objects, then it moved into design language. I started reading a lot of design archives and fell in love with how romantic design language is. The way someone talks about a bookshelf or a chair stems back to the foundation of aesthetics – the way that philosophers used to talk about beauty.

I think design language still holds that romantic personified language. I love being able to have these interactions with objects in a way where the response I’m receiving back from them is a controlled interaction. I don’t know how to explain that.

A lot of philosophers who have studied aesthetics talk about how in your pursuit for understanding beauty, the process of following attraction is a process of understanding yourself.

NT: What song was the hardest to write?

KAS: They all felt really easy to write because it was my first time writing from a place of a love language. All my other music is more story-based and this is just pure love language. It felt really easy because I felt like I was in love for each song.

NT: What do you want listeners to take away from Gush?

KAS: There’s a few sentences that I keep sharing with people that I think really, just like sum it up for me. I keep pointing people back to these sentences, so I’m just going to share them again.

Gush – is about those “Look at this” moments…
shared between people…

It is about flirtation with objects and the environment…
It is about sensuality and personification…
It is about synesthesia and surrendering to those moments when the senses melt together…
It is about “ the third thing” that is created when 2 things come together…
It is about the way the human form is in service of…
It is about experiencing the genius of everything…

If I had to describe the album in one sentence, it would be “experiencing the genius of everything.” The whole album is about the feeling of what happens when I approach something with the mindset of “there’s something genius about what’s in front of me.” That’s a large part of my practice with object empathy.

NT: What song are you most excited to perform live?

KAS: I really like performing the song “Urges,” which has the same vocal melody and phrase over and over again, but the floor underneath is constantly changing. That one’s really fun for me to play because I’m so used to changing everything above the floor. That song was an experiment of what happens if I keep the top part there the whole time, but change everything underneath it.

NT: Who are your mentors?

KAS: It depends on what I’m learning. Learning is one of my favorite things. It’s so dorky, but it just really is. Whoever I’m learning from at the moment is my mentor.

I have a long love of hand balancing. At the moment, my hand balancing teachers are my mentors. There’s like a direct correlation for me between what I do with my physical body and music.

I don’t know if that’s because of the synesthesia. Most people who have it can’t wear sunglasses and hear that well, there’s something that happens to me with being upside down. It does something for my musical brain. I can’t really explain it.

NT: What did you watch, read, and listen to while writing Gush?

KAS: I read this book called A Timeless Way of Building. At the time I was learning how to do lobbyist tree climbing, so I watched a lot of knot tutorials, like how to tie knots. For the last two years I’ve been listening to the same thing over and over again which is dance hall. It’s my coffee between smells.

Pre order Gush by Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith HERE