Kate Carr's new album explores a vertical trajectory through the UK capital, re-imagined from top to bottom in a suite of elegant and mysterious field recordings.
"On New Year's Day this year I set off from my home in Loughborough Junction to undertake a rather idiosyncratic journey. For a long time now I have wanted to try and trace a vertical trajectory in London – and New Year's Day with its connotations of renewal and starting-over seemed just the time to attempt to flee upwards, if you will.
The spine of this album is that journey from roughly minus 20 metres below sea level to 240 metres above on that cold, short wintry day. It was a quiet day, by London standards, but not silent. It was still a London of some bustle and activity. Of overheard moments and chance encounters involving delivery drivers, commuters, tourists, taxis, tubes, buses, retail workers, joggers, crows, pigeons and foxes.
As I traced my ascending route from the depths of the Victoria Line, to the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, Soho, Bloomsbury, and upwards to Kilburn, Hampstead, Crystal Palace, The Eye and The Shard I was struck by how reliant on all sorts of infrastructures this trip was. Electricity, gas, data, food, water, all of these systems, some silent, others audible, were intertwined in one way or another with my movement.
The recordings I took move from the electromagnetic hum of the underground and the DLR, delivery trolleys and bicycles, the echoes of public piano recitals, quiet parks and ambiences from the privatised spaces of the Eye and the Shard.
This is just one moment in London. One journey on one day by one person. A version of London which is entangled with my own identity and recording practice. But it is also, I hope, a rendering of the city which might in its strangeness or familiarity reverberate with the version of London you carry inside of you, whether this is drawn from experience, fantasy or indifference.
My version is by turns fond, exasperated, frazzled, charmed, disappointed, hopeful, engaged and alienated. All the colours of experience for this most intimate and visceral of relations: a journey through the city I call home."
Kate Carr (born 1977) is an Australian sound artist and field recordist based in London. her practice explores the encounters, textures and technologies entangled with field recording using movement, objects and experimental recording techniques. She creates intimate, delicate and hybrid soundworlds which centre the interactions and collectivity which generate soundscapes. She works across composition, performance and installation. Everything from vibrations caused by cars and footfalls, to overheard murmurs, public speeches, music in public space, and the roar of distant sporting events has found its way into her compositions, and live performances. Inspired by the layers, minglings and silences in our collective soundscapes, Carr is interested in composing works probe the soundscape for clues as to how we negotiate living together. She is particularly focused on hybrid soundscapes: where forest meets town, nuclear power plant meets wetland, booming car stereo meets residential street.
In her live work she is increasingly examining some of the ambiguities of field recording, pursuing a practice which blurs live foley work with field recording techniques. As such her instruments move from scientific rockers, massage guns, bird horns, frog rattles, watering cans to bug clickers in compositions which aim to trouble the associations of authenticity often attached to field recording, versus the sonic fictions of foley work.
As part of her practice Carr also runs the sound art imprint Flaming Pines. She has also founded the sound art duo RUBBISH MUSIC with Iain Chambers. Her music can be found on the labels Helen Scarsdale (US), Hasana Editions (Indonesia), Rivertones,
Persistence of Sound (UK), Longform Editions (Australia) Galaverna (Italy) as well as Flaming Pines.
See also
Rubbish Music (Iain Chambers & Kate Carr).
