Upset The Rhythm & Caught by the
River present...
KATE
CARR
THE
LONDON SOUND SURVEY
DJ
NICK LUSCOMBE
Thursday 22 September
Cafe OTO, 22 Ashwin Street, Dalston,
E8 3DL
KATE
CARR has been
investigating the intersections between sound, place, and emotionality both as
an artist and a curator since 2010. Her work has taken her from the Arctic
circle to the borderlands of South Africa, with stops in rural Thailand,
fishing villages in Iceland, and rainforests in Mexico, along with extensive
explorations of western Europe, Ireland and the British Isles. Her music
is an eerie symphony of cracking power lines, cries of water birds and the high
pitched wine of nuclear towers, Carr’s recordings trace the temporary wetlands
of Marnay-sur-Seine, situated alongside a large nuclear power plant, just
after the flooding of the river. New album, ’I Had Myself A Nuclear
Spring’ came to fruition last year, when Carr spent a month alone
in Marnay, a small town of about 200 people in the champagne district of
France, about 120 kilometres east of Paris. The surrounding woodlands provided
an astonishing landscape to explore. Full of mud, water, rusting machinery, old
boats, logs, and birds, it is a place Carr refers to as “spectacular, eerie and
ugly”. In the spring, many of the roads into the town were closed, having been
flooded with water up to about chest height and the many dirt tracks through
the forest were transformed into fast flowing streams.
Determined to document each
surrounding sound, Carr procured a rusty bike and spent time slipping, sliding,
falling and wading through bogs, ponds, surging streams and flooded fields.
“These muddy marshes filled with buzzing electrical towers, corroded machinery,
shrieking birds and canals feeding a nuclear complex were like nothing I had
ever seen,” she notes. “Water has inundated our language. There is a watery
word which can adequately serve for almost every emotional state we can
imagine. The happy tinkle of a mountain stream, the drama of stormy seas, murky
depths, and turbulent rivers. Water is unknowable and uncontainable – it floods
and overflows, forms whirlpools and eddies. It surges, and runs away. Water
leaves us to drown, float, sink or swim. It cleanses and redeems; it stagnates
and threatens.” ‘I Had Myself A Nuclear Spring’ is released on 26th August
via Caught by the River’s Rivertones label. You can pre-order the album now
here: https://caughtbytheriver.greedbag.com/
THE
LONDON SOUND SURVEY
collects the sounds of everyday public life throughout London and compiles past
accounts to show how the sound environment has changed. The idea for the London
Sound Survey formed while Ian Rawes was working as a storeman in the British
Library Sound Archive. Older members of staff still referred to their workplace
by its former title, the National Sound Archive, so the website's name was a
hybrid of that and A Survey of London, the book written by John Stow in 1598.
The historical aspects of sound can be as interesting as its present-day
manifestations, sometimes more so. Ian made his first London recordings in
April 2008 and the site went online just over a year later. Since then it's
grown from about 200 recordings to 2,000 and progressed from a hobby almost to
a full-time project. Alongside his own efforts he’s been pleased to feature
work by Richard Beard, Andre Louis, Stuart Fisher, Felicity Ford, Jonathan
Prior and others. Ian gives regular historical talks under the general title of
London's Lost Worlds of Sound, presenting and discussing some of the archival
recordings featured in the London Sound Survey, whilst certain recordings have
also been featured on BBC Radio London, World Service, Resonance FM, and BBC1
London news. Sounds from the site have also been used on Radio 4 and in
audiobooks released by BBC Worldwide.
DJ
NICK LUSCOMBE is a
British radio DJ, having presented various self-selected new music shows since
1999 for the likes of XFM, BBC 6 Music, Resonance FM and BBC World service. His
hugely engaging Flowmotion radio show has been broadcast every week on FM radio
since 2000. He has also presented BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction since 2010 too.
No comments:
Post a Comment