There is something undeniably musical about Kate Carr’s recordings. On Midsummer, London, she observes pulses and rhythms which otherwise go unnoticed: the fluvial gulping of the Thames, the polyrhythmic interactions of commuters’ footsteps, the industrial ambience of roadworks.
Field recordings of mundane human activity are inherently mysterious things. In an urban setting, a sound artist could be described as an agent of removal or deletion, and the thing that they are removing or deleting is the visual element of a scene. What is left is a kind of puzzle: the sound of footsteps with no visual clues or cues to tell us where those feet are going means we have to construct the narrative ourselves or let its countless possible outcomes wash over us. In the opening minutes of her 2014 release Paris Winter/Spring, sound artist Kate Carr captured the noise of footsteps and the siren of an emergency vehicle. Removed from the particularising nature of visual experience, we immediately hear these sounds in a more mysterious way: seduced by the possibilities of travel, wary of the many dangers of the city.
Carr’s new album, Midsummer, London, is in many ways a continuation of Paris Winter/Spring. It was composed from recordings taken on midsummer’s day in 2023 as Carr travelled – on foot and public transport – across the city from west to east, roughly following the course of the Thames. These recordings were then formed, through a process of collage, into one continuous piece split into fifteen sections with broadly descriptive titles. Thus, the whole thing takes on a broadly narrative cast: the first scenes take us through Clapham, Staines and Shepperton to a soundtrack of motor vehicles, joggers, waterbirds and roadworks, but beneath these quotidian sounds are other, weirder elements, noises of murky origin that seem to have been pulled from the depths of the river and polished or sharpened by Carr in a studio setting.
Although much of this recording is either psychologically uncanny or intellectually profound (or, at times, both), there is space for levity too. You first notice the humour in the section titles: ‘Lunchtime for the office crowd, I like the sound of swan rescue’, ‘Crossing the river: I am getting hungry and lots of people are talking about food. Also Jesus loves me’. But it’s there in the recordings too: the brief conversation with a dog, a drain that mimics human breath (or is it the other way around?).
She is specifically attuned to the relationship between sound and travel, not just the physical way in which movement creates sound and sound implies movement but also the effects that different topographies have on the character and mood of sound. In this way, Carr moves beyond the primary focus of field recording – to create a chronicle of an environment – and into more subjective or ambiguous realms, and this is part of what makes her artistry so interesting: you can listen to Midsummer, London as a piece of archival recording, and you can listen to it as something moving and meditative, something that plays around with notions of nostalgia, hauntology, the strangeness of place.
This is made possible by Carr’s use of collage, a technique that allows for – even encourages – juxtaposition. She places the mundane in direct contact with the unheimlich: the cawing of crows, disembodied singing, metallic clangs. This also lets us read her work from a sociopolitical angle. Aspects of urban decay, gentrification, multiculturalism, and the class divide in general can all be discerned at various points. Acolytes of Mark Fisher’s books will find much to love here.
There is something undeniably musical about Carr’s recordings, and that is because there is something musical about the way humans live their lives amongst buildings and pigeons and mass rapid transit systems. She observes pulses and rhythms which otherwise go unnoticed: the fluvial gulping of the Thames, the polyrhythmic interactions of commuters’ footsteps, the industrial ambience of roadworks. Whereas on Paris Winter/Spring, she wove threads of traditionally melodic music – some gentle acoustic guitar, for instance – into the field recordings, here she is content to let the streets do the talking, and the urban landscape proves that it is perfectly capable of constructing its own melodies.
Midsummer, London (Persistence Of Sound UK) 4th July 2024
Bandcamp: https://katecarr.bandcamp.com/album/midsummer-london