Last heard from Kate Carr in 2016 with her cassette It was a Time of Laboured Metaphors which won over Jennifer Hor with its “whimsical titles”, its “wistful mood” and its attempts to connect with an “intangible spirit world”…this Australian sound artist is quite the restless traveller and while we last thought she’d made her home in Belfast, apparently she’s putting down roots in London just now. Today’s tape The Story Surrounds Us (THE HELEN SCARSDALE AGENCY HMS041) is a total charmer, full of rich and unusual sounds and a highly imaginative approach to assembly, editing, story-telling, the production of meaning…while she appears to work with field recordings and documentary tapes collected on her travels, she’s also very much concerned with music and making a beautiful experience, so what ends up on the finished product moves seamlessly in and out of real world snapshots into dreamy fantasies and reveries, now drenched with sunlight, now filled with shifting shadows… “fugitive” would be just one of many keywords we might grasp at in an attempt to account for this evanescent effect.
The press releases describes the assembly process here as “contextualising”, a ten-dollar word of the sort you might put onto your art council grant application form, but it’s accurate as far as accounting for what Kate Carr does with her (hopefully vast) collections of audio snapshots and the way she weaves them into these musical episodes. It’s a mystical journey of sorts we’re given here, one where the textures and ever-shifting fields of information are presented to us with just the right degree of editorial intervention, sufficient to trigger amazing free-form associations in the listener’s mind. Let’s be honest, it’s close to hallucinatory, almost the very “out-of-body” experience guaranteed by the label…
I think it must take a rare sensitivity and deep observational skills to be able to get to this point, comparable to the work of that visionary master of cassette tape diaries, Aki Onda. And it’s strikingly original; never once did I encounter a commonplace sound nor sense that Carr was meandering purposelessly into ambient drone clichés. Very high recommendation for this compelling, dreamlike statement of wonderment. From 27 November 2017.