Mistletone

KAITLYN AURELIA SMITH TOUR DATES:

• SYDNEY: Thursday January 12 @ St Stephen’s Uniting Church, Sydney Festival. Tickets & info here.
• MELBOURNE: Friday January 20 @ NGV Friday Nights. Tickets & info available from NGV.
• MELBOURNE: Saturday January 21 @ Sugar Mountain Festival. Tickets on sale now.
• HOBART: Sunday January 22 @ MONA FOMA Festival. Tickets on sale now.

Mistletone is proud to present the debut Australian tour by Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. American composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith is cresting a new wave of electronic music, with dazzlingly beautiful compositions to open up our consciousness of the natural world, inner and outer space. Her pioneering work with the rare Buchla 100 synthesiser is rebirthing a forgotten technology to create an auditory world that is at once deeply human, spiritual, futuristic and present.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s formative years were spent communing with nature on Orcas Island in the northwest region of Washington state, a place she describes as “one of the most magical and peaceful places I have ever been.” Though she wouldn’t begin experimenting with modular synthesis until many years later, her creative work continues to be infused with and inspired by the vitality and serenity of Orcas.

Kaitlyn left the island to attend Berklee College of Music, where she studied composition and sound engineering, initially focusing on her voice as her primary instrument, before switching to classical guitar and piano. She employed many of the skills she refined in college in her indie-folk band Ever Isles, but a fateful encounter with a neighbor who lent her a Buchla 100 synthesizer, had a profound effect on her. Mesmerized by the Buchla’s potential, she explains “I got so distracted and enamored with the process of making sounds with it that I abandoned the next Ever Isles album.” Starting with rhythmic patterns and melodic pulses, she soon began sculpting lush and exciting worlds of sound.

• “Sheer poetry: charming, playful, evocative, and showing mastery of her medium” – SUZANNE CIANI
• “It’s a difficult balance, pulling in pieces from the fringes of electronic culture and framing them in something so delightfully breezy. Smith triggers sounds that bounce around like hyperactive jellybeans, making it feel like her electronic bleeps and bloops are lost in joyous conversation with one another” – PITCHFORK
• “Adventurous, mesmerizing sonic compositions which cause me to remember my love of music in the early days of electronic sound making machines” – REGGIE WATTS
• “Gorgeous, droning ambience” – BROOKLYN VEGAN
• “Mind-expanding suites of melody and unhurried curiosity” – DECODER MAGAZINE

Watch Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith demonstrate her signature Buchla Music Easel and arsenal of modular synths at her LA studio for FACT: