Alex Green

bio

sonic collage

Having spent several years moving between stints in Asia, Europe, and the United States, Kent Carson and Evan King filled more than their share of SD cards with field recordings. The resulting trove of fly-on-the-wall audio ran the gamut, from serendipitous glimpses of elegance to bits of ugliness better left unshared.

In 2020, a series of experimentations with the recordings ultimately became the genesis of the musical project and pseudonym Alex Green: an outlet for deeply layered sonic collages that merge synth textures, found sounds, and fluid input from collaborators to form a proxy for the lived experience of different locales.

“The name Alex Green is a bit disarming, a bit ungoogleable. He’s a cipher, a stand-in for this idea that people are mostly just composites of the places and experiences that shape them,” they explain. “That notion really came to light for us when we started assembling the sounds we’d each recorded during our travels––even though these were the experiences of different people, certain commonalities started to emerge. It gave us this sense of global sameness that transcended time or place or person.”

In traversing the project’s influences, one would be remiss to ignore the lack of conventional musicians. In lieu of virtuoso guitarists and classically-trained composers, the duo instead draw inspiration from creators of retinal art (Ray Johnson, Picasso, and Modigliani among them) and the oblique strategies of self-described “non-musician” Brian Eno. Intermixture is likewise a recurring theme, whether it be found in the music itself or in the ever-changing portrait that identifies Alex on the Internet, algorithmically constructed by borrowing and merging features of different human faces.

In late 2021, the duo released “Curvature of the Earth” as Alex Green. Seen through the eyes of Alex as a lone, anonymous traveler, the album is a spiritual and sometimes humorous journey drawing upon samples collected around the globe.