Diane Barbé

BIO

Diane Barbé explores the intersections between ecology and experimental music, working with field recordings as well as synthesis, flutes, and acoustic instruments. Her work ranges across multiple musical practices, the making of acoustic instruments from reclaimed materials, the development of non-musician ensembles in several countries, and the creation of spaces for alternative music education.

Her last album was released in 2023 on First Terrace Records, featuring The Alien Kin, a growing ensemble of whistles, flutes, clay pots, and handmade sound makers, used to explore the playful spaces of interspecies communication, non-standard tunings, and collective synchronization. In 2022, Diane released the field recording album “a conference of critters,” recorded in Thailand during the pandemic, on the forms of minutiae label.

Diane collaborates with Laure Boer in the radical improvisation duo Arbore, which embraces drone, noise, lullabies, and technoid evocations of witchcraft. She has performed solo at experimental music festivals and venues such as INA-GRM in Paris, Nachtdigital and Documenta15 in Germany, AADK in Spain, Ankali in Prague, and Maerz Musik in Berlin; she has taught at higher education institutions such as the Conservatoire de Musique de Marseille, Hildesheim Arts University, and the Universität der Künste in Berlin.

She has created environmental musical instruments, sound pieces, and installations at the Floating University in Berlin, Grabowsee in Brandenburg, the Raddusch biosphere in the Spreewald, the St Marthe quarry in Marseille, Global Forest in the Black Forest, and the Kilpisjärvi biological research station in the Finnish Arctic, always focusing on listening as the primary practice of sound.