Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: Gush

"While the Los Angeles-based synthesist has long bent electricity into sound meant to course through and energize the body-she's made music explicitly intended for meditation and yoga practices, and several of her albums have offered sound as a tool for self-healing-she hasn't, until now, lingered long in compositions that might inspire a body to spring up and dance. Gush is her most social, libidinal, and active collection of songs to date, mixing her cerebral synthesis with beats inflected by two-step, dancehall, and ballroom."

"A longtime yoga practitioner, contortionist, and acrobat, Smith also started taking vogueing lessons and attending balls while composing Gush. The collective narrativizing of ballroom-the way dancers can embody the social meaning of a given song-inspired her to think through the tension of feeling like a subject while being perceived as an object. "It was really helping me untangle my own identity as a queer, female bodied person, and feelings about objectification," she said in a recent interview."

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith shifts from meditative, healing-focused synthesis toward a more social, bodily sound on Gush. The album pairs cerebral synthesis with beats influenced by two-step, dancehall, and ballroom to create active, libidinal songs that invite movement. Smith's background in yoga, contortion, and acrobatics informed the record, and new vogueing lessons plus ball attendance shaped its social energy. Engagement with ballroom's collective narrativizing led Smith to probe tensions between being a subject and being perceived as an object, and to confront queer, female-bodied identity and objectification. Gush also seeks to convey Smith's synesthetic sensory experience through sound.

Read at Pitchfork