The west coast-based sound-maker and experimenter Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith weaves melodic patterns and pulses, using various analogue synthesizers – like the rare EMS Synthi 100 synthesizer, a vintage Buchla modular synthesizer, earning her a fun title as a composer and producer – “synthesist.” Her palette includes strings, bassoons, clarinets, and horns, natural sounds, and noisy textures, along with her layered vocals with arresting results.

On Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith's latest, The Kid, due out in October, she crafts a playfully strange expression of human awareness via these synthesized sound designs that falls neither in the pop world nor the avant/classical. The album’s over-arching concept maps human existence from birth to death, from awareness of the self to seeking wisdom and achieving peace and how that might coexist in nature. Synthesist, producer and composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith joins us in the studio to perform some of her recent creations.

RIYL: the films of Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli, Suzanne Ciani, Joshua Light Show, Euclidean geometry, Anna Meredith, and s t a r g a z e.