Konrad Kinard releases new album

Texas-born composer and performance artist Konrad Kinard has always always swerved genres or neat labels. Raised in Denton and shaped by New York’s downtown avant-garde sphere, he’s been on an artistic voyage where sound, movement and memory collide. His collaborations have paved a path through the experimental underworld of late 20th-century art; The Woodentops, Arthur Russell, Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca, Bettina Köster of Malaria! and La La La Human Steps, among many others.

From New York to Berlin to London, Konrad has been an creator of spaces and scenes, forging performance hubs such as SIN Project Space and The Butterfly Lounge. Now based in Leeds, his work continues to develop while balancing reflection with reinvention. His latest release, his expansive new album titled War Is Family (Surviving the Cold War and the Unraveling of an Imagined America), might be his most ambitious and personal work thus far.

Released through Incinerate Media and The Orchard, the album draws together decades of experimentation into a meditation on memory, myth and identity. It’s part memoir, part sound collage and part requiem for a country that only ever existed in the imagination, what Konrad himself calls “a radio drama without the drama or the radio.”

The project reaches back to his childhood in Cold War-era Texas, where the fear of nuclear annihilation hung over everyday life. “I was born a Texan. I was born into the Cold War. Sputnik circled the earth and shattered the peace in my home. This album is a letter from that time — from a child raised under the eternal threat of annihilation — to the Now,” he reflects. That sense of generational anxiety ripples throughout the record, where spoken word, found sounds and stacked instrumentation intertwine in what feels like a transmission from another time.

Spanning twenty tracks, War Is Family arrives like a sonic memoir that’s cinematic in scope but intimate in its emotional context. Opening with the ominous “Born A Texan” and closing on the cathartic “A Texas Summer Night,” the record reconstructs a psychological landscape shaped by paranoia, patriotism and the slow unraveling of belief. It’s not nostalgia Konrad is chasing here but an understanding of how myth and memory shape identity, both personal and national.

Built by a remarkable ensemble that brings together generations and continents, Konrad’s own multi-instrumental work of vocals, piano, guitar, bass, programming even a homemade “carrugahorn” is joined by contributions from BJ Cole on pedal steel, cellists Eleonora Rosca, Emily Burridge and Matthias Hejlik, drummer Chris Farr and harmonium and bass from producer Fredrik Kinbom. His children, Taro and Lola Kinard, lend their voices to the project, adding a poignant familial echo to a record based in inheritance.

Produced and mixed by Kinbom at Madame Vega’s Boudoir in Berlin, with additional production from Boris Wilsdorf and Bryce Goggin, War Is Family blends field recordings, live takes and spoken passages which blur into one another, creating a listening experience that feels alive, unpredictable, poetic and profoundly human.

In many ways, the record distils Konrad Kinard’s lifelong approach of art as excavation and from his early work in New York’s performance scene to his interdisciplinary projects across Europe, he’s always treated sound as a form of storytelling. With War Is Family, he’s written perhaps his most personal chapter yet, presenting an elegy for an imagined America, but also a love letter to survival, determination and the strange comfort of remembering who we were when the world first started to end.

Listen to War Is Family below