Stream: Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, ‘Expanding Electricity’

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Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith (Photo by Chantal Anderson)

Should meditation and/or yoga help you get through these difficult days — and they certainly couldn’t hurt — the 2019 album by experimental electronic artist Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith would be a good addition to your routine. She even hosted a “guided experience” for the album, titled “Tides: Music for Meditation and Yoga,” last year at the Getty.

Since then, Smith has signed to the Ghostly International label, which will release her new album “The Mosaic of Transformation” on May 15.

“I guess in one sentence, this album is my expression of love and appreciation for electricity,” Smith said in the album announcement, explaining that during the making of the album, she kept to a daily regimen of physical movement, honing her flexibility, strength and, unexpectedly, what she calls “a visual language” (a term from filmmaker Sean Hellfritsch) made up of vibrational shapes. She interpreted them as cymatics “as a reference for how frequencies can be visualized,” much like a mosaic.

“The inspiration came to me in a sudden bubble of joy,” says Smith, a multidisciplinary artist who two years ago founded Touchtheplants as an outlet for visual art, poetry, fashion, dance and intellectual explorations as well as music. “It was accompanied by a multitude of shapes that were moving seamlessly from one into the other. … My movement practice has been a constant transformation piece by piece. I made this album in the same way. Every day I would transform what I did yesterday … into something else. This album has gone through about 12 different versions of itself.”

“Expanding Electricity,” the first song revealed from the new album, takes the listener on an ethereal, euphoric ride on radiant synths. Consumed intently, it’s as much of a guide as a song, spiraling upward in synthesized splendor. In a better time, this might inspire ecstatic bouts of communal movement; as it stands, it could offer some solo solace, and maybe a portal to a frequency you didn’t know you had.

||| Stream: “Expanding Electricity”

||| Previously: “Abstractions”