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CD
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SPECIAL 001CD
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$13.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 10/16/2026
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith returns with Ruin: It's Not Just Music, a new studio album that marks one of the most decisive statements in her creative trajectory. Across the past decade, KAS has established herself as a unique voice in experimental electronic music, a composer and synthesist whose work dissolves the boundaries between ambient electronica, contemporary classical, composition, and immersive sound design. Her new album arrives with a distinctive gravitational pull. The record moves with greater physical force, placing rhythm and impact at the center of its architecture, revealing a more confrontational and embodied dimension of KAS's musical language. Where much of KAS's earlier work explored harmonic environments, the forthcoming album is built around tension and release. Inspired by the sound of drum and bass, breakbeats fracture through dense fields of synthesis, percussive patterns and her signature melodic fragments -- motions that feel closer to the kinetic language of club music than the meditative spaces often associated with her past catalogue. The result is a body of work that feels both recognizably hers and newly charged, music that moves through the body as insistently as it engages the mind. KAS's practice has steadily expanded beyond the expectations placed upon experimental electronic artists, moving between orchestral composition, audiovisual installations, film scoring, and large-scale commissions while retaining the unmistakable sonic signature that defines her work. Her prolific collaborators and creative partners have ranged from Patti Smith and Suzanne Ciani to Danny Elfman, Tycho, Glass Beams, RY X, Caribou, Four Tet, Reggie Watts, and Max Richter, while her compositions have appeared in projects with Apple, Chanel, Meow Wolf, the BBC Orchestra, and major film and television productions. On Ruin: It's Not Just Music, that vocabulary becomes more kinetic than ever before. The record draws energy from jungle, drum and bass, and dance-floor focused electronic music while retaining the intricate synthesis and tonal curiosity that have defined KAS's work from the beginning. The result is a record that feels equally at home within club culture, contemporary composition, and the experimental spaces that have long championed her artistry.
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LP
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SPECIAL 001LP
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$34.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 10/16/2026
LP version. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith returns with Ruin: It's Not Just Music, a new studio album that marks one of the most decisive statements in her creative trajectory. Across the past decade, KAS has established herself as a unique voice in experimental electronic music, a composer and synthesist whose work dissolves the boundaries between ambient electronica, contemporary classical, composition, and immersive sound design. Her new album arrives with a distinctive gravitational pull. The record moves with greater physical force, placing rhythm and impact at the center of its architecture, revealing a more confrontational and embodied dimension of KAS's musical language. Where much of KAS's earlier work explored harmonic environments, the forthcoming album is built around tension and release. Inspired by the sound of drum and bass, breakbeats fracture through dense fields of synthesis, percussive patterns and her signature melodic fragments -- motions that feel closer to the kinetic language of club music than the meditative spaces often associated with her past catalogue. The result is a body of work that feels both recognizably hers and newly charged, music that moves through the body as insistently as it engages the mind. KAS's practice has steadily expanded beyond the expectations placed upon experimental electronic artists, moving between orchestral composition, audiovisual installations, film scoring, and large-scale commissions while retaining the unmistakable sonic signature that defines her work. Her prolific collaborators and creative partners have ranged from Patti Smith and Suzanne Ciani to Danny Elfman, Tycho, Glass Beams, RY X, Caribou, Four Tet, Reggie Watts, and Max Richter, while her compositions have appeared in projects with Apple, Chanel, Meow Wolf, the BBC Orchestra, and major film and television productions. On Ruin: It's Not Just Music, that vocabulary becomes more kinetic than ever before. The record draws energy from jungle, drum and bass, and dance-floor focused electronic music while retaining the intricate synthesis and tonal curiosity that have defined KAS's work from the beginning. The result is a record that feels equally at home within club culture, contemporary composition, and the experimental spaces that have long championed her artistry.
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LP
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TTP 102LP
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Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith is an American composer, performer and producer, originally from Orcas Island and currently based in Los Angeles. After several self-released albums, Smith was signed to independent record label Western Vinyl in 2015, who released her first official album, Euclid, in January 2015. Tides: Music for the Meditation and Yoga, was released in January 2019. Smith grew up and was home-educated on Orcas Island, Northwestern Washington. She left the island to study composition and sound engineering at Berklee College of Music in Boston, before returning to the island after her graduation. It was after returning home that Smith discovered synthesizers, when a neighbor introduced her to the Buchla 100 Synthesizer. Having originally intended to use her voice as her primary instrument, and then moving to classical guitar and piano, Smith switched to the use of synthesizer after being leant and experimenting with the Buchla 100 for a year. Smith formed indie-folk band Ever Isles whilst still at Berklee but left the project after discovering the Buchla 100, explaining, "I got so distracted and enamored with the process of making sounds with [the Buchla's potential] that I abandoned the next Ever Isles album." When developing her composition skills, Smith used visual aid as inspiration for her music. She has said that she is always composing to a visual in her head, explaining, "Sometimes I let the sound create the image for me and then I build off that. Or vice versa: I come up with imagery that is inspiring to me, or I see something that is inspiring, and then create sounds that I feel match it." Recorded in 2013, Tides is a glimpse into the early phase of what has become Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith's signature approach to electronic music. Composed and played on a Buchla Music Easel -- the modular synthesizer that gives Smith's music its organic feel -- this collection of instrumentals is at once uplifting, transportive, and meditational.
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