Isabella.

Isabella set up her own studio in Muide, a reconverted industrial neighborhood north of Ghent, right beside the canal. She named it Nachtwerk, which means night work. It's two rooms, with the soundproofing built by hand by a local carpenter out of recycled materials. The first night she shut the door, sat down and listened to the silence of the empty room: it was hers, nobody else's. A backpack for carrying your own things suits someone who built her own place and wears it on the inside.

Before she had a studio, Isabella recorded out in the open. She'd bike out at night to the Waasland polders, the land reclaimed from the water west of Ghent, plant her microphones among the reeds and wait for hours: water, insects, a distant train, the wind. For field recording, the whole kit fits in the backpack: microphones, cables and the night's food. A silver ginkgo leaf hangs at her neck, a gift from her mother that she never takes off, not even when she records in the dark. There's more about her in her biography, and in the rest of the Animal Kinhood series I sign as Yago Partal.