Upcoming gigs
April 27 as Rubbish Music with Tim Olive. Also featuring Ivy Nostrum and Matt Atkins, Hundred Years Gallery, London.
May 19 as Rubbish Music for Flatpack festival, Printmakers Arms, Birmingham.
May 24 solo in support of Viv Corringham’s album launch at Hundred Years Gallery, London, also playing moreskinsound.
May 25 as Rubbish Music for SPARC [Im]probable Networks symposium, City, University of London.
June 2 in collaboration with David Donohoe for OpenEar festival, Sherkin Island, Ireland.
New release.
A Field Guide to Phantasmic Birds
Room 40 (CD/digital)
All the birds I never recorded, and some I did.
Re-imagined. Stretched and stuttering, glitching and morphing, swirling and sputtering.
Artifact and performance, digital bits all.
I imagine them swooping and calling in these scaffolds of sound I have made for them.
Gleaming amid technicolour jungles. Alive, unassailable; in a world we haven't ruined.
In a field recording I never made.
Usually concealed in dense foliage.
From A Field Guide to Phantasmic Birds out Nov 17 via the wonderful Room 40.
New release.
Fever Dreams
June 15, Mana Records. (Vinyl/digital)
“Composed during one of London's endless dark and locked down winters, Fever Dreams is a fantastical, speculative take on high density living. From dark, mouldy rooms, subterranean depths, symbiosis and multi-species entanglements, it cloaks itself in the claustrophobia, excitement and despair of living in a metropolis. It is a work which both celebrates and fears the weeds, spores, vermin and grime of London. The dark fantasies, frustrations, and utopian aspirations of its urban survivors. Frozen plastic bags, cramped living quarters, the kindness of strangers, the desperate unfairness of who gets what and when. Almost getting there but not quite. Being overcome by emotion for no reason. Unexpectedly moved, inexplicably destroyed. The never still, forever unfolding moments which comprise living on top of each other. Sinking and swimming; together/apart.”
- Kate Carr
A smouldering, sunken sound from Kate Carr on her album for Mana, exploring a latent and inward pressure from a mix of field recordings; gongs; underwater reverberations; flickers of static and electricity; found reel-to-reel choral recordings, played forward and backward. The result is a gothic dub and dark ambience that hangs heavily in the air, a narrative of middle spaces and dense environments where noise and muffled secrets bleed through the thin plasterboard from the next room over.
Texturally and emotionally it's a potent mix of insulated hope and gritty reality, holding a microphone to space and sound that the mind might otherwise blot out. Multi-species, metal, organic, and digital, dirty, self-built gathering ground, with towering verticals, deep subterranean depths, and gritty layers of lived-in grime, watery and terrestrial, human and non-human pressed together.
New Release!
False Dawn
Out March 3
A foley forest of bird horns, frog rattles, bags of rice, bug clickers, bottles of water and squeaky toys awakens after a long dark evening.
I have spent a lot of time recording dawn choruses at many different field recording workshops. Never knowing what to do with all these recordings, I embarked on a quest to perform my own version of one in my studio. As such this work is an experiment in artifice, a forest I have breathed and gestured into existence via horns and whistles, rattles and squeaky toys.
This piece comes out of a series of live performances of dawn choruses I did in London as well as one in Vienna in 2022.
-- Kate Carr
New Duo RUBBISH MUSIC releases Upcycling
Along with Iain Chambers I have started a duo called RUBBISH MUSIC. Together we are focused on creating soundscapes from our discarded items.
Our first album is called Upcycling. Released Oct 21, 2022.
“Rubbish Music uses sound to investigate the journeys, transformations and impacts of our discarded objects. Using our worn out treasures, empty vessels and broken devices as an orchestra of vivid musique concrète materials we examine the worlds we make and destroy via our rubbish.
From the great rubbish patches we have made in our oceans to buried dumps and sophisticated recycling plants the objects we let go of continue in many guises without us. Decay, transformation, re-purposing and recycling are just some of the means by which our everyday objects might persist and change in ways which extend beyond our relationships with them.
These journeys discarded items embark upon also create new worlds, new niches for species. From the changing habits of animals making the most of our swathes of waste, to the rise of plastic devouring bacteria, throwing away objects, and what happens to them next has profound effects. With our toolkit of rusty bells, dirty oven grills, onion skins, toilet plungers, wine bottles, nasal spray and a squeaky chicken toy, we seek to imagine some of them.”
