Track by Track: Anastasia Kristensen – Bestiarium Sombre

Music

Anastasia Kristensen has a rule for digging through record shops: she wants tracks “with a face.” Personality. Character. Something with a pulse of its own. It’s as good a key as any to what she’s built on Bestiarium Sombre, her debut album, where that same logic gets pushed all the way down into the composition itself.

Every track here is an animal. Secretary birds, black-footed ferrets and sperm whales sit alongside creatures that exist nowhere outside Kristensen’s head. She calls the system Anthropomorphic Music: rhythm, texture and atmosphere built from the physiology and behaviour of a given creature, real or invented. What comes out the other side slides between bleep, jungle and dubbed-out IDM without settling into any of them, sounding like nothing so much as itself.

Below, Anastasia walks us through the album, track by track.

<a href="https://anastasiakristensen.bandcamp.com/album/bestiarium-sombre">Bestiarium Sombre by Anastasia Kristensen</a>
01
Magpie Song
Magpie singing recorded at Little Bay, Sydney while on tour. Much later it turned into this ritualistic prologue — the intro before the intro. There’s no particular reference; every instrument is busy making this soothing harmony spiral happen, and that’s perhaps the point in itself.

02
Intro
This LP is largely inspired by glitchy releases across the past five decades. The fascination with human-nature-machine sci-fi worlds seems to prevail throughout the times, and this track is no exception — it’s an invitation to the balmy darkness of Bestiarium Sombre.

03
Black-Footed Ferret
A UFO-sounding rhythmical chess play. This was also the track we used with Tessa Laroche, an independent French dancer who choreographed and performed to it during my album release evening in Copenhagen. I really enjoyed that we could collaborate like that.

Tessa Laroche choreographed and performed live to this track at the Copenhagen album launch — one of those moments where the music found its body.

04
Secretary Bird
It’s glitchy and techy and has a bright narrative. One of the intentions with this album was to utilise as physical a sound as possible and yet mould it into a dancefloor setting — I think Secretary Bird checks all the boxes on that. A fun footnote: I spotted an actual secretary bird on a residential building in West Copenhagen just a week ago.

05
Sulphur Mustang
These mustangs actually exist. Perhaps my recent visit to Iceland had me influenced here — it’s a place of thermal waters and very distinctive horses. The mustang here is galloping through the atmospheric features. It won’t leave any techno-head bored.

06
Hydraulic Whale
One of my favourite tracks on the album. I’d been playing around with field recordings of a hydraulic mechanism in a car, and suddenly I had the sound go all musky and animalic. It was an easy combination — if you think about it, whales have an internal hydraulic mechanism too. The opening is a mad electro chunk to establish the setting, which then turns into sleek percussive techno.

07
Silver Cuttlefish
This is my favourite track on the album. When I say the record draws inspiration from 45 years of computer music — Silver Cuttlefish is exactly what I mean. Trippy, squelchy, minimalistic, sort of with a happy ending too. It reminds me of my earlier work, MAXIMA.

08
Outro
The main inspiration here was acknowledging that sometimes it’s necessary to say goodbye to things that are not good for you. It’s melancholic, but it leaves a lot of room for hope — which is something I think outros were made for.

09
Bestiarium Sombre
I actually produced this three years ago, and I remember composing the keys back in 2016 — so it was built layer by layer over years. Jungle tradition, but with a cowbell twist, of course.

Bestiarium Sombre is out now on Intercept Records