about

kimi recor is a berlin based sonic artist and sound therapist. she was born and raised in a forest in bavaria, and has spent most of her life trying to find her way back to those roots. she grew up on the og bloody fairy tales, the ones where a father cuts off his daughter's hands and cinderella's stepsisters carve up their own feet to fit the slipper.

in those stories it is nearly always women who pay. they get punished for wanting, for knowing too much, for choosing to live solitary lives deep in the forest alongside the natural world. kimi has spent years reading her way through pre-christian european folklore, and that thread, the power of womanhood and what it cost, runs through everything she makes.

over two decades she has immersed herself in a wide range of musical genres, instruments and styles. she cut her teeth in the midwest punk scene before decamping for california, where she fell in with the early jungle underground and, in 2004, started a long collaboration with john tejada. their single "strange creatures" on plug research opened a partnership that became bavaria, whose one full length, "we'll take a dive," landed on n5md in 2014. her name kept turning up in unrelated corners of the underground after that, with the invisibles, dræmings, black flamingo, kevin and scam likely.

everything shifted in 2017 after a sonic meditation with gongs and crystal bowls. the layered harmonics and immersive frequencies left a lasting impact on her well-being and sparked a deep interest in the relationship between sound and the body. she began studying with a range of teachers to understand how frequency affects the nervous system. today she teaches others how to use sound as a tool for healing, creativity and nervous system regulation through frequency with kimi, with an approach rooted in accessibility, especially for those without formal music training.

she fronts schnallo, the post-punk darkwave project she produces herself, known for high energy live shows, bilingual lyrics and bold, danceable rhythms. she also plays in two bands with the techno punk empress louisahhh, the post-hardcore unit pain magazine and the electro-punk outfit wicked girls, which keep her on european stages for long stretches of the year. she is also part of the ambient duo skywater, whose double ep comes out on rare beast later in 2026. part of her power is the way she morphs between genres and energies, holding all of it at once. "my own musical input is like a snake with many heads," she says. "as one ends, more pop up." twenty years of changing shape.

earlier this year she released schlafes bruder with the ambient composer andy aquarius, who also mixed and mastered applewater. with marc elsner she released the ambient trilogy i, ii and iii.

applewater, her first fully solo record, is where her obsession with womanhood and what it cost finally culminates. "it holds the hope for another world," she says, "the sorrow for the one we are losing, and the pervasive feeling that everything turns in circles." recorded and produced in her own studio on eiswerder insel, a small island in the havel that spent the nineteenth century as a weapons forge, it is built out of the decade she has spent teaching deep listening and sonic meditation, with gongs and crystal bowls alongside analog drones, field recordings and looped voice. the title comes from the old name for avalon, the isle of apples, a place just out of reach.