Kate Carr

Kate Carr’s practice explores the encounters, textures and technologies entangled with field recording using movement, objects and experimental recording techniques. She creates intimate, delicate and hybrid soundworlds which centre the interactions and collectivity which generate soundscapes. She works across composition, performance and installation. Everything from vibrations caused by cars and footfalls, to overheard murmurs, public speeches, music in public space, and the roar of distant sporting events has found its way into her compositions, and live performances. Inspired by the layers, minglings and silences in our collective soundscapes, Carr is interested in composing works probe the soundscape for clues as to how we negotiate living together. She is particularly focused on hybrid soundscapes: where forest meets town, nuclear power plant meets wetland, booming car stereo meets residential street.

Kate regularly performs in the UK and Europe including Donaueschingen Musiktage (Germany), Rainy Days Festival (Luxembourg), Oscillations Festival (Brussels), Bone X Iklectik (Barcelona), Sonic Territories (Vienna), The Long Now at Kraftwerk (Berlin) and Supernormal in the UK. Other notable live performances include Barbican, Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, Instants Chavires (Paris) and AB Salon (Brussels). As part of her practice she also runs the sound art imprint Flaming Pines. In 2022 she founded the sound art duo Rubbish Music with Iain Chambers. Her music can be found on the labels Room 40 (Australia), Persistence of Sound (UK), Mana Records (UK), Helen Scarsdale (US), Hasana Editions (Indonesia), Longform Editions (Australia) as well as at Flaming Pines.

In her live work she is increasingly examining some of the ambiguities of field recording, pursuing a practice which blurs live foley work with field recording techniques. As such her instruments move from scientific rockers, massage guns, bird horns, frog rattles, watering cans to bug clickers in compositions which aim to trouble the associations of authenticity often attached to field recording, versus the sonic fictions of foley work.

In 2022 Carr also began composing and performing as part of the duo Rubbish Music with Iain Chambers where the pair build soundscapes from discarded objects. This live work has seen Carr and Chambers performing with shampoo bottles, toilet plungers, oven grills and rusty saucepans.

She has also been commissioned to produce new work for Late Junction and The Verb on BBC radio 3, and her works has been featured on BBC radio 6, The World Service and BBC radio 3. In print her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Telegraph, Pitchfork and The Wire among other publications.

Carr is Australian, and lives in London.

Photo: Performing at Cafe Oto by Naomi Morlan.