Tilman Kanitz is a Berlin-based musician, director, producer and curator whose work moves between contemporary music, performance, music theatre and sound installation. Trained as a cellist, he played in opera orchestras before leading the Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop as artistic director until 2019, and has since concentrated on his own practice. Tiere is his first solo LP, following the cello and piano duo record he made with Ernstalbrecht Stiebler for Edition Telemark.

Everything on the record comes from a single sound: a whistle of an Alpine ibex lasting a tenth of a second, recorded at close range high in the Alps, beneath a melting glacier. Kanitz stretched that fragment to twenty minutes with a series of different algorithms, then layered, edited and processed the results.

At that degree of magnification the original call all but vanishes. What is left are the by-products of the process, glitches, spectral drifts and granular grain, together with frequencies that lay outside the range of hearing or of playback and have been shifted down into audible territory, so that details normally impossible to perceive come to the surface.

Each algorithmic version keeps its own timeline. Kanitz removed sections but never rearranged or looped the material, the only exception being the opening of the second side. The animal is no longer depicted; what remains is a trace in which the machine, the listening ear, the decisions taken by that ear and a non-human voice can no longer be pulled apart.

LP on Edition Telemark (940.01), two sides, Tiere I and Tiere II.