Rubbish Music
Fatbergs
UK PERSISTENCE OF SOUND PS013 CD (2024)
This is the team of Iain Chambers and Kate Carr, evidently enjoying a productive musical relationship since Carr arrived in the UK from Australia. She has a record on this label called Midsummer, London which came out in 2024, and we very much enjoyed her earlier cassettes for Helen Scarsdale Agency.
Both Chambers and Carr are modern electro-acoustic musique concrète types, making imaginative use of field recordings, and location recordings, and overall the label Persistence Of Sound has done much to advance the boundaries of all these genres. Well, today’s item is not about junkyards nor an attempt to “rubbish” the past achievements of the European studios and composers that made so many innovations with tape music in the 20th century – rather it’s a direct comment on pollution, specifically the contemporary horror of the vast mountains of waste we are creating every day in our industrialised societies. One aspect is all the food waste and nappies and other globs of muck being flushed down the toilet, which are known to coagulate into these hideous “fatbergs” – so called because they are as big as icebergs. Wet wipes and cooking fat are the main offenders, and together they make a lethal combination. Once formed into these gigantic floating ogres of filth, it’s evidently well-nigh impossible to break them down again.
Iain Chambers and Kate Carr formed Rubbish Music in 2022 as part of their project to, I suppose, bring this plight to our attention. The previous 2022 album Upcycling (on Flaming Pines) did at least offer us a grain of hope – it was made using discarded objects found in the average domestic rubbish bin – they took stuff from bathrooms, visited recycling centres, and even hinted at the value of recycling with the track title ‘Trash and Treasure’. The duo also turned the project into interactive workshops, inviting non-specialists to take part, and in Birmingham they donated a soundtrack to a public information film on the subject. Since then, that Blue Peter styled optimism has now given way to today’s far more pessimistic statement, and although the music may be subtle and subdued, it still leaves us feeling distinctly uneasy – if not horrified – at the prospect of these stinking Leviathans inhabiting the sewers beneath our feet.
The evocative images they create in sound are concealed by the clinical cover art – or so you think, until you look closely to see a stylised rendition of plumbing pipes, with an ominous bulging shape right in the middle, enough to give instant nightmares to Tommy Jones and his mate from Checkatrade. And of course the elaborate track titles are part of the scheme, conveying the weight and scale of these grotesque fatbergs in no uncertain terms – one of them is the size of a jet airliner, one of them “slithers” in the manner of a movie monster, and one of them is simply “huge and disgusting”. Make no mistake, our two creators regard fatbergs as an unwelcome non-human living presence, blocking an important part of the circulation of our modern world; the “trolls of our pipelines”, to use their own expression.
In creating these convincing sound-portraits, conveying the inertia and implacable nature of these huge greasy blobs, Rubbish Music have made a unique artistic statement – but also indicate the sheer impossibility of addressing this serious problem. All proceeds from the sale of this album go to help the efforts of Thames Water solve this problem (not really). (01/11/2024)