For 12 months’ access to an app called Calm—MSRP $69.99, with a lifetime option available for $399.99—your desktop and mobile screens will purportedly become a balm against the captive and infinite present. There are featurettes meant to help you sleep, reach peak performance, and breathe more thoughtfully. In “7 days of Soothing Pain,” communication teacher Oren Jay Sofer coaches you—tidily, hospitably, efficiently—how to cope with awful news. Stars like Matthew McConaughey and Laura Dern contribute audiobooks and self-affirmations. Composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith—an elegant practitioner of the Buchla modular synthesizer, classical pianist, Yogi, and warm, benevolent spirit whose music has always been very much like a rainbow mist radiating out of the goblet of Earth—premiered her new album on the app a few weeks ago.
There is something of a new age awakening afoot. A yearning for holistic spiritual nourishment now lives prominently inside advertising copy, news segments, retail operations, and Twitter dispatches from humanoid brands, each tapping into a collective longing for a return (or brief holiday) to something resembling even partial wholeness. I have seen Deepak Chopra on television every week for the past four weeks. Cooking and gardening websites, which are experiencing an unprecedented boom in web traffic, have passages on mindfulness alongside voguish recipes for very umami noodles or how-tos on watering your indoor plants. “Are you operating from a place of fear and scarcity?” asked the chief content officer of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop in a recent conversation with Entrepreneur magazine. “Take the time to articulate this for your business, yourself, the universe, and the divine.” The captive psyche—and following suit, the market—is arching hurriedly toward high Zen.
The conch shell of serenity has been blown with steady pressure across the past 40 years in the fringe universe of East-meets-West experimental music. American new age’s spiritual crucible is roughly rooted in northern California, and, like most monasteries, the genre works somewhat like a family. Based in the small town of Bolinas, Smith’s own sonic relationship and serendipitous friendship with Suzanne Ciani—“America’s first female synth hero”—nurtured her practice with the Buchla world of synthesizers. The massive, water buffalo-sized Buchla 200 series, and Smith’s preferred Magic Easel model—which both work by tweedling the envelope and expression of tones into limitless configurations—were created by Ciani’s one-time boss Don Buchla, the former NASA engineer and close peer to the Grateful Dead’s sound tech, Owsley “King of LSD” Stanley. Like any computer or mind-altering psychedelic, the instrument is meant to mess with the texture of space and time to create an intergalactically exotic experience.
Smith’s Buchla music routinely resembles a glowworm of paradise writhing along the other side of the cosmic lane. Her collaboration with Ciani, on an album titled Sunergy, recreates the sensation of watching serene clouds float in miniature. EARS, Smith’s enormous 2016 release, has inspired me more than twice to lie on the ground in a dark room and consider my purpose. Her albums regularly feature the melty blue sounds of an orca’s bubble and squeak, then give way to a foamy bloom of tones that communicate in a language spelled out of mandalas. One of her recent EPs, The Electronic Series Volume 1: Abstractions, contains beautiful Buchla effervescence alongside “a short comic about two friends—a plant and a human being—having an existential conversation.” Each forthcoming volume is “intended to nourish inquisitiveness.’”
The Mosaic of Transformation, like Smith’s last album, Tides: Music for Meditation and Yoga, is also made for nourishing purposes. Here, she softly bangs the synthesized gong of a generous strain of spiritualism usually reserved for the discourse of Reiki classes or mindfulness retreats. It veers inescapably toward a place that—while technically inspiring—is unintentionally part of a larger system blanketed as what we need right now. By working earnestly, affectionately, and overtly in kneading the tensions of fear, it points, gently, at the conflicts it tries to abate.
By kind design, or by dint of years of yoga practice, nearly all of Smith’s vocals are instructional, inclusive, and meant to be chanted. “Remembering” has eight words of lyrics: “Be kind to one another,” she hymns, as if through syrup. “We’re calming together.” She loops these words through the song’s entirety in a polyphonic canon, rounding and rotating phrases in slow, loping drifts. “The Steady Heart”—equally wreathing, equally peace-inducing—grows like sea lather during a tide. “I believe,” she begins. “I trust. Open up your heart.” Crescendos build, layer, and are serenely laid to rest.
As with all chants—religious, political, or like those at the end of a core flow class—their goal is to unify the chanter with a greater whole. Psalms like Smith’s are more than acceptable at face value as restorative, pure-of-heart acts of grace, yet your threshold for bearing this attitude of exceeding amiability may vary. Often, I found myself at odds with her messages, though they are plain and pure as sun. Feel warmth. Feel gratitude. Heal, she patiently asks.
The Mosaic of Transformation implicitly states that the endpoint of immersing yourself in its music—wherever or however you may get it—is to care for yourself, which, in turn, will make your world brighter, more palatable, easier to surmount. It is a tender, munificent offering from an artist who has operated in these modes her entire career. But the very idea of wellness has been made curious under present circumstances. Self-care is now less about getting oneself optimized in time for work and more about being able to breathe normally on a Wednesday afternoon. Smith acknowledges that the world is wondrous, and asks us to navigate it more joyously and effectively by centering ourselves and finding our peace. But in the absence of what was once a center—fatigue a global given, the ego constantly under duress, even the notion of work itself under siege—the music unintentionally traces the contours of our great, communal bruise.
Smith notes that the album was created alongside a practice of “improvisatory movement”—which is to say, this is a work honoring the body in motion. The final track and melodious adieu, “Expanding Electricity,” swans across 10 minutes of arpeggiated, sprawling Buchla burblings, each whorling, compressing, and flowering like a big ballet born out of the inspirational “bubble of joy” Smith cites as the genesis for this project. This image is especially intriguing at a time when the body’s movements are bounded by isolation, and the extent of our physical freedoms is limited to what we can practice at a safe distance, bubbled in anything but joy. A lyric ribbons through, asking the audience a compelling question: “How can I help to serve you so you can do what you do?”
What is it that we do now? The sort of work Smith has devoted her life to is certainly worthy, and it feels good to listen to this album as part of its express utility: to find ways to feel thankful for being alive. What’s impossible to untangle from the album is its relationship to the present, the notion that this is meant to be massaged like an ointment into the mournful, hollow dullness of life in isolation. Hope is not gone, but it often feels like it. An international existential crisis has opened and widened space comfortably, fortuitously, even miraculously, for Smith’s—and new age’s—sensibilities. What that crisis also does is reveal how it finds ways to swallow them.
Buy: Rough Trade
