Konrad Kinard releases new album ‘War Is Family’

Konrad Kinard’s latest opus, War Is Family (Surviving the Cold War and the Unraveling of an Imagined America), arrives like a spectral broadcast from a childhood shadowed by geopolitical paranoia. The Texas-born composer and multi-instrumentalist trades traditional song structures for a meticulously constructed sound collage, fusing spoken word, field recordings, and live instrumentation into a kind of “radio drama without the drama or the radio.” Across twenty tracks, Kinard excavates the anxious echoes of a generation raised under the constant hum of nuclear threat, delivering an elegy not just for a bygone America but for the imagined one that never truly existed.

Produced and sonically sculpted by Fredrik Kinbom at Madame Vega’s Boudoir in Berlin, with additional touches from Boris Wilsdorf and Bryce Goggin, the album moves like a fragmented memory, at once intimate and uncanny. Tracks such as “Born A Texan” and “A Texas Summer Night” juxtapose ominous tonalities with cathartic crescendos, mapping the psychological terrain of a nation caught between myth and memory. Kinard’s performance style, honed through decades of international avant-garde collaborations, imbues the work with the intimacy of radio theatre and the weight of existential performance art, rendering his deeply personal narrative as both a sonic archive and a contemporary reflection.

War Is Family is audacious in its refusal to comfort. It invites the listener into a liminal space where memoir collides with mythology, where Americana is refracted through the lens of trauma, nostalgia, and abstraction. Kinard’s hybrid approach—part composer, part storyteller, part archivist—demonstrates a mastery of form that is as unsettling as it is mesmerizing. It’s a work that lingers long after the final track, demanding reflection on the cultural and emotional fallout of a Cold War childhood, and asserting Kinard’s place at the vanguard of experimental soundmaking.

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