In 1980, the trumpeter Jon Hassell partnered with Brian Eno on an album called Fourth World Vol. 1: Possible Musics. The record’s title gives away its m.o.; they were trying to imagine a music that was native to a place that didn’t exist. Hassell had a background in jazz, Indian music, and classical minimalism; Eno had a background in art rock and ambient music and using the recording studio as instrument. On Fourth World they took their interests in texture and unusual structures and created music that was hard to pigeonhole. You could draw lines from certain genres to individual elements, but the sound of the whole and the way it all came together felt unique to this project. EARS, the rich and rewarding new album from composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, owes some of its sound and more of its spirit to Fourth World: this is hard-to-pin-down music for the spaces in between.
Many of the warm, bubbling textures on EARS can be traced to Smith’s obsession with a rare analog synthesizer by Buchla, but the real secret of the album’s aesthetic owes more to the fact that it’s hard to make out the sources. In her hands, acoustic instruments sound like electronic ones, synthetic sounds reference nature, and human voices sound like the creation of machines. The defining characteristics of each instrument—in addition to analog synths, the album features woodwinds and flute from Bitchin Bajas member Rob Frye along with Smith’s singing—are turned inside out and re-defined, giving the record a pleasingly alien mood that also feels oddly familiar.
Smith is prolific and her Bandcamp has nine releases, many of which are quite good. But many of her earlier records are "experimental" in the most literal sense, where she gives herself certain limitations and parameters and sees what she can create within those strictures. EARS has more to offer as an album-length experience. And while this sort of ambient music is often associated with lengthy side-long compositions, Smith’s pieces are relative miniatures, mostly of pop-song length.
Each track it filled competing approaches that clash in delicate ways. "Arthropoda" is like a new age rainforest recording made on a distant planet, with buzzing insects and liquid gurgles, but it also sounds human, as Smith’s layered voice repeats an unidentifiable phrase with a deadpan insistence that brings to mind Philip Glass or Laurie Anderson. "Wetlands" finds Smith taking voice processing even further, as syllables blur into unearthly whooshes of noise that seems to be moving through a medium thicker than water. Tracks like "First Flight" have a more conventional spacey drift and these bring to mind the earlier synth music of Oneohtrix Point Never, but Smith’s work never feels particularly referential. Even though many parts of this record sound like they could have been made in the ’70s or ’80s, you never get the sense that the technology is the point.
Though tracks are easy to distinguish by shifts in melody, they all work together as a sort of suite, and EARS almost feels like a concept album. For a technically sophisticated record that doesn’t have a great deal of dynamic range, EARS has a surprisingly strong emotional tug. Smith focuses on a narrow band of feeling—wonder, curiosity, disorientation, bliss—and constructs a gleaming sonic world to house them, a place where the lines between thoughts and feelings and styles are porous.
