Tuesday, March 1, 2016

uncanny persistence of the H - part 32 - Kate Carr

#32 - Kate Carr

press release:

Kate Carr
It Was A Time Of Laboured Metaphores
The Helen Scarsdale Agency // HMS 035
release date : 2/26/2015

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 Labored 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. 



Carr on the album:

"This album comes out of a series of travels and artist residencies I did over 2014 and 2015 not long after I had moved from Australia to Belfast in Northern Ireland. It was a time of great instability and unease, with a precarious new home, which I had trouble making much sense of, and a great deal of travel for my artistic work on trips across many parts of Europe, also to South Africa, and back and forth to Australia. And this experience of living many places, and nowhere, of constantly meeting phalanxes of new people, of stumbling and drifting, connecting and disconnecting, arriving and departing was one I found incredibly disorienting and powerful. I had a constant feeling of unease, of not belonging, and I found this infused both the physical and emotional landscape of these experiences in ways which seemed both astonishingly vivid in the moment, but somehow untrustworthy. My relationships with people, with places, with landscapes were either far too much or too little, by turns profound and mundane, life changing and pointless. I was so radically unmoored I began searching outside of myself for signs or some sort of solidity which might help to make sense of such a disorienting flow of people and places, languages and landscapes. And in such a feverish and heightened place it would seem to me that the landscape, the weather, street signs, sounds, music and architecture would conspire in the most overblown and astonishing ways. When I said goodbye to people it snowed suddenly in places it shouldn’t have snowed, hunting signs suddenly materialised warning me of dangers I didn’t know existed. I recorded a throbbing windmill branded at the top with a sign reading ‘climax’. I watched vultures while heart breaking songs in foreign languages wafted from tinny petrol station PA systems, and even in the most isolated places cars with creeping bass prowled my nights. And I found myself thinking ‘If this was a film, and it cut from me to these images with these sounds, it would be so overblown and laboured no one could take it seriously’.  I couldn’t quite trust or believe in this maelstrom of experiences, of feelings, but I could not escape them either. "

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