Carr, Kate

Carr, Kate

The Story Surrounds Us

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***KATE CARR melds the exquisite details of her field recordings with an ephemeral approach to the song. This Australian has relocated herself to London after many trips around the globe. With each orbiting journey, she has collected innumerable sounds from the urbane to the aqueous and from the frenetic to the sublime, contextualizing all of these into compositions rippling with primordial melodies through guitar, piano, voice, and electronics. The Story Surrounds Us follows her highly acclaimed albums I Had Myself A Nuclear Spring (first released on her own Flaming Pines imprint in 2015) and Carr's debut for Helen Scarsdale in 2016, It Was A Time Of Laboured Metaphors. Emblematic of her work is a gentle dislocation between the environmental sounds and her drone-dub ellipses of somnambulant melody. The clatter of a frozen dock or a vibrational shimmer from rustled objects or the unintelligible whispers displaces the sense of self amidst a sea of disparate symbols and coded thought. More a travelogue in and out of one's own body than to any particular place. Carr suggests "In a way, it is about restlessness, an uncomfortable tossing and turning in all these many different places, a struggle somehow to forge a connection between my own internal world and all these places and persons I have encountered. I think this holds a sense of unease and strain, with both beautiful and failed moments of intimacy and connection which are made either possible or impossible in the difficult and distorted context of being away....

Carr, Kate

It Was A Time Of Laboured Metaphores

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***The field recordist and lucid-dream composer KATE CARR conjures a liminal art, seeking to articulate the remembrances, the concrete fact, and the deliberate exaggerations of detail, all in the pursuit of addressing the human interaction with the environment. Psychology, history, politics, geography, storytelling, fantasy, the notion of the self, and the disintegration of these rigors at their transect all come into play in her ongoing work. She has set herself on path to make these investigations, relocating herself from her native Australia to Northern Ireland, followed by innumerable detours. Hence, It Was A Time Of Laboured Metaphors. This album from Carr intertwines the lugubrious wash of environmental detail with the dissolved songwriting described in the distant past as 'rural psychedelia' rendering an aesthetic in the orbit of :zoviet*france: or as the dub of a dub of a dub abstractions from Dome. For example, a guitar swollen with ethereal blight cycles in soft whirlpools of drone and thrum as the gloom of an irish rainstorm pours down a sewer drain. Electricity proves a nobel tool as well, as she tapes into telephone wires to extract deadtones of unanswered calls. It is as if Carr is peeling back the layers of history to uncover the ghostly stains of human existence at a particular place. The dead may not be talking; but the soil and its occupiers still do.