New release.
Organelles - with Matt Atkins - Out Jan 24, 2025
Flaming Pines (CD/digital)
New release with Matt Atkins is out early next year.
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What goes on inside a cell? What might it sound like?
Inspired by tiny processes and interactions Organelles presents a sonic imaginary of intracellular operations.
Cells are busy: folding proteins, exchanging gases, creating energy, growing, dividing, mutating and communicating. Likened to minute factories or warehouses, organelles are the entities which perform the specialised tasks which enable cellular life.
So often explored visually, this album offers one version of what the aural life of these tiny, fantastically-shaped organelles might sound like.
Their ongoing and sporadic processes, small rhythms and exchanges and the everyday and cataclysmic events and encounters that might unfold on this smallest of scales.
With both Atkins and Carr's practices rooted in the amplification and looping of small objects, instruments and gestures, the pair came to the idea of Organelles via the process of improvisation itself.
In the encounter between Atkins' and Carr's iterations and conglomerations of small vibrating objects, Organelles emerged as a collection of spluttering rhythms, creaks, rustles, strikes and chimes.
A miniature world of speculative microsound which lurches between spiky textures, wonky rhythms, static, and the occasional off kilter melody.
Upcoming gigs
Having a wee break in December, but I will post 2025 gigs soon.
New release.
Fatbergs - Rubbish Music
Persistence of Sound (CD/digital)
My duo with Iain Chambers Rubbish Music has a new album out October 18!
As we go about our daily lives, malodorous monsters are constructing themselves from our discarded detritus beneath the streets of our cities.
Built from wet wipes, nappies, food waste, fats and oils, fatbergs haunt us as a nightmarish return of the soiled, rejected and rotten.
Once these behemoths get a foothold in our sewers, they silently grow and spread, alerting us to their malignant presence via sewage overflows and blockages.
On Fatbergs, Rubbish Music take the stinking and roiling matter of fatbergs as their starting point. Across five compositions the duo turns to sound to examine the complex and unpredictable encounters which generate these gigantic conglomerations.
In this contemporary anti-fairytale fatbergs exist as trolls of our pipelines, amplifying a version of waste itself as an active presence. In this story flushing things away is not an ending, but a new beginning
New release.
Midsummer, London
Persistence of Sound (CD/digital)
“artful and disorienting” — Mojo
“abstract, unpredictable and weirdly beautiful” — The Quietus.
“moving and meditative… plays around with notions of nostalgia, hauntology, the strangeness of place” — Klof Magazine
Midsummer, London was composed with recordings taken on the Summer Solstice June 21, 2023, as I attempted to journey from one side of the city to the other along the Thames on this longest of days. The journey began in Loughborough Junction with stops at Clapham Junction, Staines, Shepperton, Hampton, Twickenham, Ravenscourt Park, Blackfriars, Deptford, Woolwich Dockyard and Slade Green.”
Kate Carr, 2024
This work is one continuous piece, with named sections.
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.”
