Texas-born composer, performance artist, and multi-instrumentalist Konrad Kinard has released his new album, War Is Family (Surviving the Cold War and the Unraveling of an Imagined America), through Incinerate Media and The Orchard. Known for crossing boundaries between avant-garde, Americana, and experimental soundscapes, Kinard delivers a project that is as much a memory archive as it is a musical work.
A haunting blend of spoken word, sound collage, and instrumentation, War Is Family unfolds as what Kinard calls “a radio drama without the drama or the radio.” Drawing on his childhood in Cold War-era Texas, the album blurs memoir and myth, turning personal recollection into a broader meditation on American identity—particularly the version of America that was promised, projected, and never fully real.
The 20-track album spans ominous pieces including ‘Born A Texan’ to the cathartic, atmospheric ‘A Texas Summer Night’, reconstructing the psychological landscape of a generation raised under nuclear threat and cultural fragmentation. Field recordings, live performance, monologue, and traditional instruments weave together into a deeply personal historical soundscape that feels both intimate and disorienting.
War Is Family also reflects a wide-ranging international production process. The album was produced, mixed, and mastered by Fredrik Kinbom at Madame Vega’s Boudoir in Berlin. Additional production and engineering contributions come from Boris Wilsdorf at AndereBaustelle Studio – home to Einstürzende Neubauten, in Berlin; Bryce Goggin at Trout Studio (Anthony and the Johnsons, Royston Langdon) in Brooklyn; and spoken word and overdubs recorded by David Whitaker at Old Chapel Recording Studio in Leeds.
Kinard’s narrative performance recalls the intimacy of radio theatre while carrying the existential gravitas of performance art, a hybrid approach he has developed throughout decades of work in New York, London, Berlin, and beyond.
With War Is Family, Kinard offers an elegy for an imagined nation and a sonic portrait of the emotional residue left by the Cold War. The result is a work that feels archival yet alive, unsettling yet tender, an album that listens back as much as it tells.
Listen below:
