Soon enough, the instrument was no longer an end but a window unto more pop-oriented structures (2016's EARS could be an analog-universe Bjork album, and a cover of Sade's "By Your Side" from earlier this year is adult-pop heaven). Smith's synthesizer experiments began with a couple of Bandcamp-released sketches of drones and oddities, then moved toward polyphonic bedroom minimalism (2014's sublime Tides). (A secret hero of sorts, Buchla was a mid-century Bay Area engineer whose machines powered the work of San Francisco Tape Music Center composers such as Morton Subotnick, while also soundtracking a few of Ken Kesey's early acid tests.)
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A home-schooled child of the Pacific Northwest who lived in a California ashram and mastered the digital editing program Pro Tools while still a teen, she decamped for Boston's Berklee College of Music to study classical guitar and composition, before finding her musical voice in the analog synthesizers of Don Buchla. Smith is uniquely qualified to dig in such complicated dirt. On the chorus of "An Intention," among the album's stand-outs, she lays out one of its lasting koans : "An artisan knows what it takes / I feel everything at the same time." Its uplift and hope are never ever easy, and the 31-year-old Smith doesn't shrink from the responsibility her music intuits.
Its kaleidoscopic song-cycle parses a new New Age and naturalist psychedelia, synthesizer maximalism and conventional chamber works, while voicing zen and the sub-conscience through a vocal processor. The Kid sounds like a West Coast record that gazes Far East-ward for inspiration. It's a beacon for the compositional and sonic place where less popular, contemporary music struggles to grow in the shadow of tradition a respite from the end-of-days feeling reinforced by our social feeds a re-up in the diminishing reservoir of faith through rethinking the balance of spiritual and physical needs. There are multiple ways in which Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith's fourth album, The Kid, feels like it was made specifically for the complicated times in which we find ourselves - as both salve and map.
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