There’s a moment near the start of Tusk where the concertina’s distinct, reedy voice grabs hold and doesn’t let go. It’s airy and sequential, as though the world is decaying just enough to reveal the codes underneath. Kristina Warren works in that gap between the familiar and the unplaceable. Messages drawn in distorted ether, imagery encrypted in aural inscriptions cast against a smooth surface. The rhythmic breath of it is jarring yet soft, somehow jolting us awake and holding us in embrace at the same time. And then a gentle, emotive cascade opens up, tenderness inside each languid chord progression, each distant spark. Textured sounds, reserved movement. I’ve listened to this more times than I can count and I’m still finding new rooms in it.
Tusk is OUT NOW on Gold Bolus Recordings. Pick up a copy HERE. Kristina’s website can be found HERE.
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What are some of your earliest memories of sound? What were the sounds that first captured your attention as a child?
The morning birds at my grandma’s place (she lived on a farm for some years when I was a kid). My mom’s piano, both its intonation and its mechanical action. The dirt-track racing a few miles from our house, especially on summer nights. I think sound came to me particularly at these interfaces with the world and the tools and instruments we use to navigate this space.
How did you first get into playing music and working with sound? Was there a particular moment or experience that set you on this path?
My mom studied music education and held various music teaching jobs during my childhood. I always had music around — piano lessons, choirs, etc — but I considered it a hobby. In college, I took a music theory class, really just thinking to learn a bit more about music as a sidebar from my pre-med studies (lol). But I liked it well and soon found myself signing up for counterpoint, composition, etc. At one point, my advisor, the wonderful composer and pianist Anthony Kelley, said, “You’re a very polyphonic composer, aren’t you?” That was generous. But I was really struck by the idea that I could already be a composer. I hadn’t considered myself artistic as a kid. And I’ve gotten much more into the electronic and experimental side since then, and I’m still evolving. But that was my first exposure to the idea, which I hear in circulation a lot more these days, that any creative act or effort counts as creative.
What drew you back to the concertina? Was there a specific sound you were after or a memory that surfaced, or was it more about wanting something you could carry with you?
In 2023, I was doing a lot of straight-up digital/analog sound, and still am. But my eyes needed a break from all the screen time, and my hands craved some kind of fidgety, stimmy activity. I suddenly recalled a distant family friend I knew in high school, who sometimes played concertina at Irish trad sessions. Although I hadn’t thought of the concertina for years, in that moment, the button grid called to my spreadsheet brain. I had a show in New Hampshire coming up, and I happened to find a guy in the area selling a used concertina on Craigslist. I didn’t think too hard about it; I figured this might, at best, turn into a fun little distraction from all the screen-based audio work. But as soon as I got the instrument back to my room in the bed and breakfast, I quietly pulled out a few notes and instantly heard the compositional and analog potential. (I seem to have a pattern of getting hooked by sound practices that I didn’t expect much from.) Since then, it’s taken a few years to get the instrument somewhat under my fingers and to realize my sonic vision for it. I feel I’m just starting to get somewhere. Yes, the concertina is portable and unassuming. It’s also unnervingly deep. I’ve played it in many different contexts, and it has a knack for cutting through.
The concertina seems like an instrument that demands a particular kind of physical relationship. How did your body learn to play it again, and how does that physicality shape the sounds that emerge?
The concertina definitely demands a certain physical relationship. (She’s such a diva, so petite yet so demanding! <3 ) I generally play an Anglo, which is bisonoric, not unlike a harmonica. Meaning, direction matters: for any given button, you get a different pitch from pushing versus pulling the bellows, hence bi-sonoric, two sounds. So you need not only the correct button but also the correct direction. Especially as a beginner, it’s easy to wind up with comically distorted melodies if you get off in your bellows pattern.
New to the concertina in summer 2023, I let my ear guide my self-study. I started not with scales and exercises, but recreating by ear tunes I already knew: pop songs, folk melodies, motets recalled from my college choir days. In fall 2023, at Providence’s annual Bach to the Future Festival, I gave my first concertina performance: a much-slowed and somewhat restructured reflection of Frank Ferko’s gorgeous (!!) SATB choral setting of the 15th-century poem Adam Lay Ybounden, which I had sung with one of my college choirs back in the day. I got particularly good feedback on how I played it using the full length of the bellows, almost like pulling taffy, to express the keen bittersweetness of this piece. It’s pneumatically safer to stay in the bellows midrange and change direction often, but I’ve chosen to cultivate this expressive, legato style as part of my signature approach to the concertina.
The more I’ve played the concertina, the more I’ve come to understand the bellows, together with the crucial air button, as highly analog in character: vastly expressive and not entirely predictable. There’s a side of my personality that can just sorta elbow my way through things, so I pretty quickly found a way to play the concertina quite vigorously. That can be very useful in some contexts. But now I’m working on dialing it back, developing more subtlety. Not unlike other sustaining instruments, the concertina magnifies tension. In quiet or slow passages, any slight tremble in my arms is audible. I’m working on smoothing that out. And I’m finding that, to get the precise and sculpted sound I want, a full-body approach is necessary: controlling the flow from all the way up at the shoulder and scapula, learning to move the bellows ambidextrously in various contexts (not only with the right hand as usual), using ab support and leg positioning to facilitate the phrasing I want… It’s all part of it.
Tusk is described as one iteration of an ever-evolving performance project. How do the live performances differ from what ended up on the album, and what changes when you commit these pieces to a recording?
In general, I play in many different contexts, from beer-soaked noise basements to sonically precise galleries. For Tusk specifically, my 2025 performances ranged from mainstay new music rooms to hard-core free improv settings, and more. Of course, the hardware/software patching approach varies across contexts, and more importantly, I really enjoy the challenge of adapting my sonic and affective approach to different spaces. Tusk, the album, landed as a suite of four audiovisual pieces with a structured-improv format, and it was a home recording, so not really linked to any particular performance, but more a snapshot of where I was at with it at the end of 2025. But, of course, no sooner have I settled this than I’m getting antsy and want to mix it up. For some upcoming concertina sets in 2026, for instance, one I might do Tusk straight-up, another I might do a deconstructed/free-improv first half and straight-up second half, later in the year I might re-work it entirely, and so on. It’s meant to be flexible. I also have an idea for a new, fifth piece, which is sonically intriguing, but technically, I think it may land more digital than analog, and I’m not sure how I feel about that yet. It’s all an evolution. I fully expected the album to be a waypoint along the road.
The title Tusk feels loaded with associations. What does that word mean to you in the context of this work?
This suite is a living, breathing creature, winged and fanged. Unusual but not totally inimical, but certainly with its own momentum. Enmeshed in its unique ecosystem. I chose the title Tusk because it seems to give a slight window into that world.
The difference tones in “Last Light” feel like they’re revealing something hidden inside the concertina itself. How do you find those sweet spots where the instrument starts generating its own additional voices?
Concertinas often have a lovely, glassy high register, and the difference tones that emerge underneath those high fundamentals are truly special. This style of Anglo offers four “spicy unisons,” or pitches that exist under two different buttons, in the same bellows direction, with slightly differently tuned reeds. I start “Last Light” with one such unison, A880(ish), and you can hear the subtle acoustic beats. Then the recorded double enters, and the beats strengthen; next I overlay the G a step down, and the beats ramp up even more; and so on. This accruing, morphing form resembles how I slowly came to relate to these difference tones. The concertina can generate a lot of spectral complexity through simple additive or subtractive processes, and it was important to me to understand the sweet spots not only as static points, but especially as moving figures that interact with one another in various ways.
Frédéric Cardin recently wrote that “Last Light” evokes gamma rays. That’s a great description of the peculiar intensity I tried to channel here. The concertina seems to call up some kind of fundamental connection, I believe largely because of its very direct and unusual acoustic profile. It feels as though we’re communicating on the level of photons. As I created “Last Light,” I thought of Leqaa Kordia (who was released in mid-March after a year in Texas’s Prairieland “dungeon,” as she’s since described it), of all those incarcerated, and of the hidden things that a strange and intense light might reveal or burn away.
Your visual work transforms recognizable locations like the Øresund Bridge into something glitchy and abstract. What’s your process for taking those images and making them responsive to the music’s shifts?
I’ve made a number of video pieces in recent years, both with and without concertina. I always use this weird, cool software called Cathodemer, which is actually a game on Steam. It has a few modules to synthesize visuals from oscillators (that’s how I worked for “Downbeat” and “Last Light”) as well as a Source module to process existing video files. Both “Data Fire” and “Tusk,” the first pieces I started developing for this suite in early 2025, use the footage I shot from the train crossing Øresund Bridge, between Copenhagen and Malmö, while on tour in 2024.
Every video piece I make is different. Sometimes I develop the visuals first, sometimes the sound, sometimes back-and-forth. In “Data Fire,” I leaned heavily on the human brain’s tendency to connect sound and image. There’s actually no direct AV connection, but the internal rhythm of the video I shot (the bridge struts rapidly crossing my view) translated into what I roughly estimated as 120 bpm, so that’s the tempo I set my ARP 2500 bass samples to. Meanwhile, the analog audio processing responds to spikes in concertina volume, so you get an indirect but, I hope, compelling association between video flashes and sound transients.
“Tusk” took longer. I came to understand this one as the most sonically “beautiful” piece in the set, but it took several attempts across 2025 to get anything approaching beautiful or layered visuals. I ultimately recorded three video layers individually, listening only to the recorded drips of melting snow (no processed concertina), and just intuitively playing the video changes, using a midi controller, when the time seemed right. Then I chroma-keyed out the black background to stack the layers. Whereas the visuals in “Downbeat” are tightly composed to meet the sonic form, I felt the AV pairing in “Tusk” needed more breathing room.
Apart from Tusk, I’ve also VJ-ed and done purely electronic AV pieces. People always comment on Cathodemer’s distinct, VHS-tape look. Not unlike the concertina, Cathodemer is very limited in some ways, but you can also do a lot with it if you play your cards right. I’ve really enjoyed exploring how this unique visual language plays with the concertina world.
How do you think about the relationship between the concertina’s acoustic voice and the electronics around it? Are they in conversation, or is it more like the electronics are an extension of what the concertina can do?
Most people I’ve talked to in Turtle Island / North America couldn’t identify the concertina by name, but when they hear it, the most common association is sea shanties, or in other words, a small, modest genre box, easily closed up and written off. To me, that’s very different from my experience of playing this instrument, which is vivid and boundless. A big part of my reason for introducing electronics was to bridge the gap between people’s associations and my felt and perceived experience.
I maintain, only half-jokingly, that the concertina is a kind of synth, because it’s resonant, quasi-predictable, and very insistent in what it does well and what it refuses to do. For 2024 touring, I ran the concertina signal through several effects pedals, which was ok, but the work has gotten a lot stronger as I’ve replaced the pedals with Eurorack gear. The concertina and the analog modules seem to get along well. Going forward, I’m thinking about analog/concertina chaos and how this might relate to compositional indeterminacy.
What does the concertina allow you to access musically that other instruments don’t? What makes it essential for this particular work?
Maybe this could be said of other instruments in different ways, but I’m really drawn to the concertina’s unique hybrid analog-digital character. I really like the digital precision needed to approach the button grid (with its limited, but more than zero, ability for pitch bending), and then of course the analog character of the bellows and air button. I find the ever-present push-pull oscillation really captivating. I referenced this earlier, but particularly on the bisonoric Anglo concertina, it’s just so comedically humbling when you get your directions wrong, and so tremendously satisfying when you land it just right, often through some balance of forethought and spontaneity. The risks and rewards of going clear out to the extremes of the bellows are so poetic, so bittersweet, they grabbed me from the start. And the discipline of sculpting the air holds my ever-growing fascination.
And lastly, to close as always… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
Many, but to name a few… the bullfrogs in the cemetery near my place. This weird metallic sigh that echoes through my neighborhood in the summer sometimes (no idea what it is). The very papery foley of offices in ’80s-90s movies, especially when the boss gets exasperated and throws down their pen in disgust. So crispy.
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