​Eco-Electronica
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Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: Existence in the Unfurling
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Smith grew up in isolation, on an island in Washington state, and there’s a certain singularity to her work that surely grew out of those roots....There’s a video clip of Smith playing her Music Easel, which enforces this album’s air of beauty mixed in with color and conjury. Smith plugs brightly colored cables into its modular interface and her hands drift over its silvery keys, creating an expanse of sound that’s more elastic than you might expect from just a few operations...​There’s an element of gear fetishization to it for sure, but also a healthy dose of wonder, causing it to feel like you’re watching someone just as enamored of the process of discovery as they are with delivering a final product. -- Excerpts from a review of Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith's album Eucld in Pitchfork


Existence in the Unfurling
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Blue Mountains Walking

“The blue mountains are constantly walking." Dōgen is quoting the Chan master Furong. -- "If you doubt mountains walking you do not know your own walking."

 “Dōgen is not concerned with "sacred mountains" - or pilgrimages, or spirit allies, or wilderness as some special quality. His mountains and streams are the processes of this earth, all of existence, process, essence, action, absence; they roll being and non-being together. They are what we are, we are what they are. For those who would see directly into essential nature, the idea of the sacred is a delusion and an obstruction: it diverts us from seeing what is before our eyes: plain thusness. Roots, stems, and branches are all equally scratchy. No hierarchy, no equality. No occult and exoteric, no gifted kids and slow achievers. No wild and tame, no bound or free, no natural and artificial. Each totally its own frail self. Even though connected all which ways; even because connected all which ways. This, thusness, is the nature of the nature of nature. The wild in wild.

So the blue mountains walk to the kitchen and back to the shop, to the desk, to the stove. We sit on the park bench and let the wind and rain drench us. The blue mountains walk out to put another coin in the parking meter, and go down to the 7-Eleven. The blue mountains march out of the sea, shoulder the sky for a while, and slip back to into the waters.” 

​Gary Snyder: Practice of the Wild
​The Furling and Unfurling

Existence, process, essence, action, absence -- it's all unfurling.  Each moment brings about something new but also leaves something behind, like the memory earlier rhythms in a song as yet unfinished.  Action and absence, novelty and perishing, furling and unfurling, always and forever.  

Forever is quite close at hand, in every here-and-now.  The furling and unfurling of stars and galaxies, of life on earth, of an individual life, of music -- Whitehead calls it a creative advance into novelty.  Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith is right.  To the degree that we are sensitive to the furling and unfurling, we do not cling to the past as if nothing new can happen, but we do not cling to the future as if it can unfold in creative ways without the past. Instead we try to walk with the furling and unfurling of the universe, just like the Zen philosopher Dogen walked with the blue mountains.  Or Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith walks with Orcas Island.

There is a kind of faith in this.  Inwardly we sense a creative lure toward beauty, toward harmony and intensity, within our own hearts. This quiet voice is God's breathing.  Trust in the breathing gives rise to gratitude for the furling and unfurling.  Faith is holding on and letting  go at the same time, while singing and crying, sleeping and dancing -- walking with the blue mountains down to the 7-Eleven, and then slipping back into the waters, one step at a time, with as much wisdom and compassion as the heart can muster, cognizant of the deep listening.

​Jay McDaniel, editor Open Horizons

​About Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith

source: http://www.kaitlynaureliasmith.com/

"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...Smith 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."
Open Horizons