To Listen At All
On Anthea Kennedy & Ian Wiblin’s Alarm Notes
Sam Dolbear
Alarm Notes
Director
ANTHEA KENNEDY & IAN WIBLIN
Year
2025
Country UK
Alarm Notes starts with the song of a nightingale and then the sound of a gunshot. In 1929, the dissident art historian Carl Einstein (1885–1940) declared the nightingale already dead, nothing more than “a cliché, a narcotic, a form of laziness and ignorance.” When we talk of the nightingale, he claimed, “we are not talking about a bird,” rather a petrified signifier that adorns the bourgeois imagination. The song of the nightingale, for Einstein, lubricates the bourgeois soul in its pursuit of asset and capital: “One weeps with the nightingale in the hope of winning big in the stock market.” Allegory, in this case, takes the “form of murder, since it suppresses the object and robs it of its proper meaning.” In this sense, the song of the nightingale is wholly fungible: it could be a rose it could be twilight it could be, to exhaust Einstein’s examples, a turbine or baseball. As the wax cylinders turn to record its call, shots ring out. It is killed if not already dead.
Alarm Notes, co-directed by Anthea Kennedy and Ian Wiblin, asks if we can listen again. The central protagonist of this film is Ludwig Koch (the grandfather of Kennedy), born in Frankfurt in 1881. As young as eight, Koch recorded the song of a caged white-rumped shama onto a wax cylinder. Thought to be the first recording of a bird ever preserved, it sparked an impulse that he would pursue for the rest of his life: to capture the sounds of nature, particularly birds. From 1928, Koch worked as head of the culture department at the Carl Lindström record label in Berlin, until his protracted flight to London in 1936, where he collaborated on sound works with the BBC until his death in 1974.
Koch’s relation to the regime and his eventual escape is the basic narrative of the film. He is addressed in the second-person pronoun throughout: “You read in the paper, Ludwig, that the Reichstag … has been set on fire. The regime is blaming the communists for this act, you hear.” History is reconstructed in the style of a judge summing up in court. The state takes more power, it imprisons, censors, exiles, dispossesses, frames, bans, and murders. Koch negotiates his place, finds himself implicated in the Reichstag Fire, and eventually leaves via Switzerland in 1936.
This forces a question: how might we contemplate, or listen to nature during–or after (if there ever is an after)–a time of fascisization? This question, however, seemingly evades Koch as he retreats more and more into the field, a withdrawal compounded by the émigré’s experience of assimilation and alienation. The film reflects this formally by slowing the narrative as Koch moves into desolate landscapes, accompanied by miles of cable, in search of crying seals, mute swans and chirping greenshanks, sounds only broken by the crackling memories of Schubert songs, recorded decades prior.
In 1939, Bertolt Brecht famously asked: “What times are these when / A conversation about trees is almost a crime / Because it entails a silence about so many misdeeds!” What about a conversation about birdsong? We can approach this through structures of realism. There’s the lyrebird that sang the song of the chainsaw and the mobile phones (ecological realism), the bullfinch that Koch recalls that sang The Red Flag in a Berlin kitchen (socialist realism), the caged bird in the ornithologist Hermann Göring’s country residence that imitated his voice (fascist realism). Maybe these are the only possible birds we can or should hear, given that they at least acknowledge the catastrophes all around. Nature unmutes itself in all its realness.
But there’s also the birdsong place outside of history, like an eternal call of beauty and revelation, the mode Einstein had in mind, songs exiled from the world as Koch himself became exiled, found in places seemingly without fascists, without politics, among only branches and rushes and wind and song. But in these scenarios, Carl Einstein still shows up. He follows Koch into the forest, however remote, scares away the nightingales, cuts the cable on the recording apparatus, and declares that there is no possibility for aesthetic experience during fascism. The misdeeds are too great. Koch also knows this: when in Shetland, he has tea with a Lord-Lieutenant who, he later finds out, had evicted tenant farmers from the island, “turning them into refugees.” Schubert plays again, water trickles.
In some notes written in the same year of Brecht’s poem—the same year Einstein killed himself jumping from a bridge also in the Pyrenees, the same year Waltern Benjamin took his life in a hotel not so far away—Benjamin wrote that “[festive] language is liberated prose—prose which has burst the fetters of script and is understood by all people (as the language of birds is understood by Sunday’s children).” I look up when Ludwig Koch was born and there it is: 13 November 1881, a Sunday! This might also explain why the fascists ultimately destroyed his collection of birdsong. This might also explain why he kept returning to the forest.
In 1991, US poet Adrienne Rich wrote What Kind of Times Are These in response to Brecht’s lament on the contemplation of nature. She begins: “There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill / and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows / near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted / who disappeared into those shadows.” There she listens to the dead, as radio so often does (think Cocteau’s Orpheus), in “the dark mesh of the woods / meeting the unmarked strip of light—” where “ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise” can be found. She finishes: “I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.”
“Now listen,” Koch says, to the nightingale, to end the film.
Sam Dolbear is a writer, researcher, and teacher based in London. He has published two books, one on the radio producer and composer Ernst Schoen (co-authored with Esther Leslie and published by Goldsmiths in 2023) and another on the palm reader and later sexologist Charlotte Wolff (published by MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE in 2024). He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Warburg Institute, where he is collaborating, alongside Esther Leslie, with Time is Away for a summer exhibition on sound and radio.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the screening of Alarm Notes at BFI Southbank, 16 April 2026.
Alarm Notes, co-directed by Anthea Kennedy and Ian Wiblin, asks if we can listen again. The central protagonist of this film is Ludwig Koch (the grandfather of Kennedy), born in Frankfurt in 1881. As young as eight, Koch recorded the song of a caged white-rumped shama onto a wax cylinder. Thought to be the first recording of a bird ever preserved, it sparked an impulse that he would pursue for the rest of his life: to capture the sounds of nature, particularly birds. From 1928, Koch worked as head of the culture department at the Carl Lindström record label in Berlin, until his protracted flight to London in 1936, where he collaborated on sound works with the BBC until his death in 1974.
Koch’s relation to the regime and his eventual escape is the basic narrative of the film. He is addressed in the second-person pronoun throughout: “You read in the paper, Ludwig, that the Reichstag … has been set on fire. The regime is blaming the communists for this act, you hear.” History is reconstructed in the style of a judge summing up in court. The state takes more power, it imprisons, censors, exiles, dispossesses, frames, bans, and murders. Koch negotiates his place, finds himself implicated in the Reichstag Fire, and eventually leaves via Switzerland in 1936.
This forces a question: how might we contemplate, or listen to nature during–or after (if there ever is an after)–a time of fascisization? This question, however, seemingly evades Koch as he retreats more and more into the field, a withdrawal compounded by the émigré’s experience of assimilation and alienation. The film reflects this formally by slowing the narrative as Koch moves into desolate landscapes, accompanied by miles of cable, in search of crying seals, mute swans and chirping greenshanks, sounds only broken by the crackling memories of Schubert songs, recorded decades prior.
In 1939, Bertolt Brecht famously asked: “What times are these when / A conversation about trees is almost a crime / Because it entails a silence about so many misdeeds!” What about a conversation about birdsong? We can approach this through structures of realism. There’s the lyrebird that sang the song of the chainsaw and the mobile phones (ecological realism), the bullfinch that Koch recalls that sang The Red Flag in a Berlin kitchen (socialist realism), the caged bird in the ornithologist Hermann Göring’s country residence that imitated his voice (fascist realism). Maybe these are the only possible birds we can or should hear, given that they at least acknowledge the catastrophes all around. Nature unmutes itself in all its realness.
But there’s also the birdsong place outside of history, like an eternal call of beauty and revelation, the mode Einstein had in mind, songs exiled from the world as Koch himself became exiled, found in places seemingly without fascists, without politics, among only branches and rushes and wind and song. But in these scenarios, Carl Einstein still shows up. He follows Koch into the forest, however remote, scares away the nightingales, cuts the cable on the recording apparatus, and declares that there is no possibility for aesthetic experience during fascism. The misdeeds are too great. Koch also knows this: when in Shetland, he has tea with a Lord-Lieutenant who, he later finds out, had evicted tenant farmers from the island, “turning them into refugees.” Schubert plays again, water trickles.
In some notes written in the same year of Brecht’s poem—the same year Einstein killed himself jumping from a bridge also in the Pyrenees, the same year Waltern Benjamin took his life in a hotel not so far away—Benjamin wrote that “[festive] language is liberated prose—prose which has burst the fetters of script and is understood by all people (as the language of birds is understood by Sunday’s children).” I look up when Ludwig Koch was born and there it is: 13 November 1881, a Sunday! This might also explain why the fascists ultimately destroyed his collection of birdsong. This might also explain why he kept returning to the forest.
In 1991, US poet Adrienne Rich wrote What Kind of Times Are These in response to Brecht’s lament on the contemplation of nature. She begins: “There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill / and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows / near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted / who disappeared into those shadows.” There she listens to the dead, as radio so often does (think Cocteau’s Orpheus), in “the dark mesh of the woods / meeting the unmarked strip of light—” where “ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise” can be found. She finishes: “I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.”
And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.
“Now listen,” Koch says, to the nightingale, to end the film.
Sam Dolbear is a writer, researcher, and teacher based in London. He has published two books, one on the radio producer and composer Ernst Schoen (co-authored with Esther Leslie and published by Goldsmiths in 2023) and another on the palm reader and later sexologist Charlotte Wolff (published by MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE in 2024). He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Warburg Institute, where he is collaborating, alongside Esther Leslie, with Time is Away for a summer exhibition on sound and radio.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the screening of Alarm Notes at BFI Southbank, 16 April 2026.