Up Late with Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith – The Hub

Against the backdrop of an ornately carved wooden pulpit and screen, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith communes with her audience through her music, with Persian rugs below her black modern-tech-laden table, and colourful rib vaulting arching high above her in The Hub’s Main Hall, originally a Church of Scotland debating chamber. This juxtaposition of traditional and contemporary creations is a suitable setting for her distinctive voice and compositions.

Smith uses Buchla synthesizers, whose original creator Don Buchla apparently intended his instruments to make new sounds, rather than simply imitating existing instruments and sounds. This marries very well with Smith’s pioneering work, which draws on classical training and a type of synesthesia in which sounds form physical sensations for her. Watching her play, mixing live vocals with her electronic sounds, is almost as fascinating as watching her videos projected behind her, with Smith hypnotically swaying and subtly embodying the sound experience as she harmonises.

Her electronica music has a full body feel of an orchestra, shifting and stretching, surging and swelling to videos of terrain caught by a racing, bike-mounted camera or of contact improvisation / dance, which can turn people into visual and kaleidoscopic objects or give natural animation to a fruit.

Orange features strongly among settings that range from neon to natural buff, now in what looks to be a warehouse, then in a personal house, and often among rocks in a dry-scaped garden or as outcrops alongside conifers or in more deserted land. The lights in the hall also dance along, shifting their beams and colours, rooted on the floor as well as hanging.

Through all this, strong bass beats underpin melodies that warp suddenly with sounds that might be from a science fiction film, or which could come from technological animals and birds, forming conversations as well as crescendos. Smith’s vocals usually interweave with and ride the soundscapes, rich, warm and yet still with a haunting quality. If only more of the lyrics were discernible! The individual pieces have names such as Drip, Urges, Stare Into Me and Gush, the latter the title track of the new album Smith releases on 22nd August, and you can hear samples of these pieces here: https://kaitlynaureliasmith.bandcamp.com/album/gush-2

The titles resonate with the textural, juicy and highly physical feel of Smith’s creations, which build lush as well as driven soundscapes, creating an almost visceral world for the listener, even when some of the more repetitive aspects of physical movement in the videos might start to lose their draw.

Up Late with Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith was a one-off event on 16th August, part of the Up Late series at The Hub for which tickets are available at https://www.eif.co.uk

Reviewer: Danielle Farrow

Reviewed: 16th August 2025

North West End UK Rating: