Alien Kin - the avian kin (2023)

The Alien Kin is an itinerant research and sound project playing with biomimicry and collective music making. Starting in 2022 with a sojourn in the Black Forest, the ensemble started to explore the sonic worlds of meadows, monoculture forests, train tunnels, bogs and imaginary places.

A long walk with Klaus-Peter, a hunter who cares for an area of forest near Triberg, raises questions like – what does it mean to interfere in the forest, for instance by hunting down roe deer when they no longer have predators? What does it mean to live in a world which is, as he says, a completely cultural or cultured landscape (reine Kulturlandschaft)?

All materials on the A side were recorded outdoors. Field recordings are haunted by a nearby highway; the spruce trees planted rectilinearly provide only limited shelter for birds, insects and mammals in the area. Their crowns tower 20 or 30 meters tall, and the grounds are systematically cleared of any bushes, scrubs, and dead wood. Stumbling in the tracks of giant pruning machines, two players follow a whimsical tawny owl and try to learn her tunes. Later, with Joan Jordi Oliver on Saxophone and instrument builder Joe Summers playing a duophonic flute, the group of three venture into a long train tunnel in search of resonant frequencies and timbral oscillations.

Side B brings into play more instruments by Summers & Barbé –bird calls, whistles, flutes - alongside vocal, musical and textural contributions by Mariana Carvalho and Pablo Diserens. The four players came together to listen to the instruments, twist them, pet them and generate compositions that were recorded at the studios of Morphine Raum in Berlin a few months later. The context is urban, the background is blank. The landscape is only an imagination, and the instruments take on new voices.

Alien Kin is curated by Diane Barbé. It has taken many different shapes and continues to grow, with workshops and instrument building sessions that currently involve ceramics and river canes.

The Alien Kin ensemble has performed at Vogelklang festival in the Black Forest, in Morphine Raum in Berlin, on the acousmonium of the GRM in Paris, at the Euphonia studio of Marseille’s Radio Grenouille, and most recently on Archipel community radio, live from 90mil in Berlin.