Music Is Music

Most of us don't go around trying to imagine what sci-fi painter Moebius (aka Jean Giraud), a nudibranch (aka sea slug), and the film: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (aka the beginning of Hayao Miyazaki's feature animation dominance) might sound like as music. It's a good thing Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith isn't most of us. She decoded those visual references and uses them as the foundation for her newest album, EARS. The whole record lives in a bubble, dripping with enough dense greenery to make a vegetarian swoon. Each song is a tentacle, surviving both in the bubble and on its own. And on a throne at the center of the album, sits a Buchla synthesizer. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith had a chance encounter with the modular synth (pronounced BOO-kla) a few years ago that changed the way she thinks about and creates music. For her, the Buchla helped fill the void of a composer without musicians to play her music. The synthesizer is her orchestra. On this episode of Music is Music, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith talks about how s