Daiana Feuer on March 22nd, 2018

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Electronic experimentalist Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith has launched a multidisciplinary label for everything good and strange. Touchtheplants will release music, dance, film, poetry, photography, instruments, explorations, experiences, clothing, fortunes and symposiums. “We are open to all ideas and formats that are rooted in the intention to encourage and edify infinite possibilities,” she says. “Anything is possible! Touchtheplants hopes to provide to each artist with encouraging inquiry towards what is possible, and to be a collaborative resource with evolving outside partnerships that are in alignment with the initial intention to find the best form for the artist’s story.” The first release is her own, “Volume 1: Abstractions,” which sounds like walking through an arcade and every game bleeds into the others creating a new crazy soundscape that somehow fits together. She will release a new volume of her own every year, consisting of musical and “an episodic comic book about two friends – a plant and a human being – having an existential conversation.” Each volume will be a different theme, this first based on a Harry Everett Smith silent film.

The second release, coming in the fall, will be “Electronic Meditations” by Gregory Kramer, her one-time neighbor who introduced her to the Buchla Music Easel. A pioneer of contemporary electronic music, Kramer was one of the first students of a Cal Arts music class on the Buchla 100 and 200 synthesizers taught by Morton Subotnick, and he’s never actually released any music.

To launch the label, Smith will be staging special performances this May in both L.A. and New York. Each show will consist of a screening and performance of “Abstractions,” a performance of her 2017 album, “The Kid,” and “a few surprises that hint at the soul of Touchtheplants.”

||| Watch: “Abstractions”

||| Live: Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith performs at Hollywood Forever on May 24 (tickets) and 25.