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Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith With London Contemporary Orchestra, Barbican Review

With a new album on the horizon, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith brought the London Contemporary Orchestra to the Barbican for a performance that balanced retrospective and reinvention. We were there to witness Smith push her sound from intimate electronics into rhythm-driven new territory.

There is a version of this concert that goes badly. An artist whose reputation rests on intimate, slowly breathing electronics, paired with a full orchestra, performing new material the audience has not heard before: that is a lot of variables to hold. What made the evening compelling was watching Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith hold them all, if not always equally.

The first half was structured as a retrospective, marking ten years since the release of EARS and tracing the arc of Smith’s compositional practice across that decade. ‘Stratus’ and ‘Existence in the Unfurling’ framed a complete performance of 2025’s Thoughts on the Future, the album that established her reputation for making experimental electronics feel emotionally immediate.

In a moment when truth itself feels unstable...there is something quietly radical about an artist refusing the comfort of easy resolution.

The accompanying notes were unambiguous about the album’s subject matter. Thoughts on the Future examines what grief does to the body and the mind, the necessary disembodiment and cocooning that comes with loss. It is, the notes insist, not an album about healing but an album about truth. In a moment when truth itself feels unstable, when everything from politics to identity is endlessly contested, there is something quietly radical about an artist refusing the comfort of easy resolution.

Which makes it worth noting that the dominant feeling in the room was not grief, but elation. There is something telling in that gap. Smith’s music seems to metabolise loss into something that feels, in the listening, closer to transcendence. Whether that is a limitation of the work or its quiet achievement is probably a question worth sitting with.

The London Contemporary Orchestra, under Robert Ames, encouraged that feeling throughout. Ames conducted with restraint, avoiding grand gestures or imposed climaxes and allowing the music to find its own weight naturally. Small melodic figures slowly expanded into overwhelming waves of sound before collapsing back into near silence. ‘Thoughts on the Future’ drew the most sustained applause of the first half, the kind that comes not from obligation but genuine release.

How Smith produces that effect is not entirely legible, and part of the point is that it should not be. The temptation, and one this reviewer has not always resisted, is to want a technical inventory: what is looped, what is live, what is triggered. From our seats, the rig was not fully visible. What looked like a Buchla Easel appeared to be somewhere on stage, though we could not be certain. There was almost certainly extensive real-time looping, and processed vocals ran throughout much of the set.

But cataloguing the equipment misses the point, just as analysing a pianist’s fingering technique misses the performance itself. The spectacle lies in the interaction between performer and sound world, and that was what the room became immersed in. Watching Smith alongside the orchestra only amplified that feeling. Woodwinds mirrored modular synth phrases, percussion locked into pulsing sequencer rhythms, and swelling strings blurred seamlessly into the electronics. At times, it became impossible to tell where acoustic instrumentation ended and synthesis began.

Visually, the performance matched the music’s organic complexity. Soft lighting and abstract projections avoided tired futurist clichés, instead reinforcing the tactile, ecological quality of Smith’s sound world. Even at its most technologically dense, the performance retained a deeply human centre.

After the interval, the concert became a different proposition entirely. Smith returned to perform her forthcoming album in full. It is titled RUIN: It’s Not Just Music, a name that invites interpretation. The accompanying notes offered little clarification, which felt intentional. What they did make clear was this: “this is not new age, this is not ambient.” She means it.

Where the first half asked the audience to surrender to slow time, the second pushed into physical, rhythm-driven territory. Breakbeats frequently approached the 170 BPM mark, with passages edging toward industrial techno before snapping back into something melodic and soft. Bonobo and Overmono came to mind. So, briefly, did Squarepusher.

The most arresting moments came when tracks suddenly mutated mid-course. Drums would disappear for eight or sixteen bars, entirely new sounds would surface and the music would fold back into a transformed version of itself. These were not transitions so much as reveals.

Smith’s vocals were central throughout, shifting between rhythmic scatting, heavily processed harmonies and more conventional melodic passages. The vocal processing appeared to be happening live, possibly through a Kaoss Pad or similar effects setup, which placed Smith in an interesting position: simultaneously composer, performer and engineer, making decisions in real time that a less confident artist would have pre-programmed.

‘That Is Like You’ and closing track ‘On the Low’ were standouts, though such things are always subjective. More striking was the confidence of the material itself. The new work feels less interested in creating atmosphere for its own sake and more concerned with tension, propulsion and release.

The London Contemporary Orchestra, so integral to the first half, appeared only occasionally after the interval, reduced essentially to punctuation. Whether that is a deliberate structural choice or a sign that the new material has not yet fully found its orchestral logic is hard to say from a single performance.

Still, the overall shape of the evening felt remarkably coherent. The first half transformed grief and introspection into something expansive and euphoric. The second externalised that energy into something louder, more physical and occasionally confrontational. Together, they suggested an artist still actively reshaping her language rather than settling into established signatures.

RUIN: It’s Not Just Music is out on October 2nd and available for pre-order now. The standing ovation suggested the room required little convincing.