Kate Carr is among those artists for whom field recording is not a means of documenting reality, but a tool for exploring the relationships between place, movement, the body, and listening. Her work grows out of an interest in the ways sound shapes our experience of space – from the distant sounds of the city, conversations and music drifting out from public spaces, to the vibrations of cars and the sound of footsteps. Carr creates compositions, installations, and performances in which the boundaries between field recording, composition, and performative action become increasingly blurred.
Her practice also encompasses the construction of instruments from found and discarded objects, as well as the development of her own recording methods based on movement and specific protocols. She runs the Flaming Pines label and, since 2022, has worked with Iain Chambers on Rubbish Music, a project that uses everyday objects and discarded materials as sources of sound. Carr is particularly interested in hybrid soundscapes, where nature meets infrastructure and space becomes more than simply a site of recording – it can itself become an instrument.
In this conversation, she talks about her journey from glitch and experimental electronics to field recording, her distrust of the notion of the “authentic” field recording, her work with foley, travel as an element of composition, and the ways in which listening can become a form of participation in space. We also discuss why an interesting recording does not necessarily have to be a “good” recording.
Artur Mieczkowski
Artur Mieczkowski: Before field recording became the foundation of your artistic practice, you were fascinated by experimental electronics, glitch, and various forms of sound manipulation. Was working with field recordings a natural extension of those earlier explorations, or rather the discovery of an entirely new way of listening? Do you remember the moment when you first felt that the sounds of the world around you could become your own artistic language – perhaps through a particular place, situation, or recording?
Kate Carr: I discovered field recording not too long after glitch, as some of the labels involved overlapped to a degree, or at least were discussed in the same circles. I wasn’t really drawn to that many straight field recording albums, more so Oval, Farmers Manual and Ikeda’s sine tone compositions. I brought this sort of sensibility to field recordings which I took on my way to and from my job, which at that time was as a sub-editor in a very new development in Sydney located on a former industrial dumping site.
So this was already a very interesting location, quite surreal as it was so new but also so empty, as not many people or businesses had moved in yet. It was also very boundaried: it just ended very abruptly at the particular limits of the development itself and went back to being a sort of wasteland.
There were also a lot of cicadas in this area, so my lunch breaks were often spent wandering around this very weird area, listening to my minidisc player, recording cicadas and reading The Wire magazine actually. In that sense I don’t think field recording really arrived as a seismic moment. Gathering sounds via my very basic recorder just became a way of finding material to compose with. I did not have any synths or anything like that, so cicadas and traffic signals were my go-to sounds for a period. I also was really drawn to the atmosphere field recordings lent to a work. I think I also felt the unpredictability of field recordings was important compositionally, and there is for me a certain gestural or evocative quality to fragments of location sound which is somehow crucial to the type of work I want to make.
A.M.: In your work, you increasingly blur the boundary between field recording and foley, between the act of recording sound and consciously creating it. How do you perceive this relationship? In a world where every recording is already a form of interpretation of reality, is the idea of an “authentic field recording” still important to you?
K.C.: No, I don’t think I have ever subscribed to this idea of an ‘authentic field recording’. I have always been interested in the partial, incomplete and entangled nature of field recordings, the jumble of things they bring together: a moment in time and space, a particular technological configuration, a particular encounter between recordist and location, different processes ongoing in that location, encounters with people or non-human species.
This partial and authored component of field recording has always been of concern to me, and it is something I have used titling to reinforce as well. I tend to title my work in reference to experiences: I had myself a nuclear spring, for example, or It was a time of laboured metaphors, to take two earlier albums of mine. Titling is very important to me, and my titles and choice of words are absolutely part of the work and critical to it. I aspire for the experience of my work to emerge from that nexus between the titles and the sounds themselves.
As for foley, yes, this has become a really joyful area of exploration for me, initially driven by live performance. Of course, as a field recordist, presenting work live was a challenge and I struggled with this a lot. I absolutely did not want to perform using just a laptop, but I have no instrumental training or significant skills in this area. Live and in compositions I have tended to draw on instruments as sort of sounding objects, and over time this expanded to all sorts of objects well beyond instruments. I use microphones and approaches which I first used in my field recording practice as a way of sounding objects or instruments live. This direction of travel eventually led to me attempting to reproduce field recordings using only objects, such as my releases fake creek and false dawn, attempts to perform an underwater recording and a dawn chorus, respectively.
I would note as well that my foley reference point is quite different to that of a foley artist trained in this area and working within cinematic traditions. My reference points are not cinematic conventions in relation to the production of sound effects, but rather field recordings and how objects might be used to recreate them. It is quite an idiosyncratic approach, but for me it has probably been the most exciting and enjoyable aspect of my practice for the past few years.
I have also very recently begun experimenting with foley in the field rather than on stage by doing performances with objects and small instruments in parks while I record. This has been a super interesting thing to experiment with this summer, sitting within a recording and sounding in response to a location. I put up a few examples of this on my bandcamp a week or two ago.
And finally, my live work with objects has also generated a lot of collaborative performance opportunities with musicians and sound artists, and this has been a very unexpected but super welcome new layer to my work.
A.M.: In your doctoral thesis Trajectories of Field Recording: Sonic Fluxes, Fuzzy Lines and Relational Space in Practice, you examine field recording not as a neutral documentation of reality, but as a relational practice shaped by the connections between place, the body of the recordist, and the act of listening. Did the research process change the way you approach making music, or did it mainly give you a language for articulating ideas and intuitions that had already been present in your work from the beginning?
K.C.: I think it did both. Obviously doing a PhD asks you to learn how to articulate your work into a new context, that of academia, and that requires perhaps different reference points and, to a degree, a different language. I found the demand to articulate the ‘why’ of the work, and the decision-making process which produced it, really valuable.
Not everyone is like this, but I am very attached to articulation as a critical part of my artistic process. I like to find precise ways of describing what it is I am trying to do and why. In the process of finding the words for that, I feel I also come closer to comprehending the centre of the work, and what can be tightened, discarded or somehow adjusted in relation to that centre.
So I would say doing the PhD made me much more aware of my own process, which to that point was largely not consciously comprehended or articulated and more a process which was intuitive and felt. This felt aspect has not at all left my work, but the long process of articulation required by the PhD has given me a much deeper appreciation of what my practice seeks to do, and why.
Where I would say it has changed my work, or generated a new layer in my practice, relates to recording protocols, or what might be thought of as procedural approaches to field recording. I undertake explicit protocol-based recording practices, such as the Transect – Heathrow perimeter walk with bird horns, where I recorded for 90 seconds every 45 minutes and I have a new thing I am about to release which involves 12 different trips to the London Eye, which explores the impact of different recording protocols on the recorded version of that trip. These documents are potentially more conceptually interesting than audio works you want to listen to for pleasure, but those ideas flow through into my more musical works as well.
A.M.: Your work often encourages us to listen to what usually remains unheard. Do you think silence truly exists, or is it simply another mode of listening?
K.C.: I don’t think I really have an answer to this, in that I am not thinking in this sort of register around the existence of silence. My orientation is more, if we take the example of silence, questions like: what is perceived as silent? Or what qualities might different silences have?
I am interested, for example, in loud or intrusive silences. In English there is a phrase which goes something like, “it was a silence which spoke volumes”, and this sort of thing I find intriguing. I am also interested in generative quietness or silence, which is obviously often at play within field recording: what acts of sounding might keeping quiet produce? This question interests me a lot.
I am also interested in acts of sounding which are somehow coded as nonconsequential and close to silence, even though they are actually sounds. Most of the questions I find fascinating around sound or silence pertain to perception, social coding and significance, and subjective experience. So in terms of silence I am interested in how it functions in different settings, and how it is differentially experienced.
A.M.: You often record places that exist at the intersection of different worlds – nature and infrastructure, silence and noise, public and private spaces. What fascinates you most about these kinds of “hybrid” soundscapes?
K.C.: It is a few things. One is the intrusion of the unexpected in ways which puncture clichés or easy categorisations of locations. I often talk about a recording I did up a mountain in Iceland which I thought would include wind, gulls and perhaps snow falling but as I pressed record an aqua aerobics class with pumping dance music started up. Things like this I find delightful.
Another time in Mexico, on a group residency programme, I thought I would try recording some late-night insects, so I left a little recorder out and on listening back found it filled with faint music from a late-night party somewhere nearby. I like these traces of the unexpected and, in a way, the contaminating: sounds which complicate what is ‘natural’ and what is human, and question why these categories often exist as a juxtaposition in the first place.
I think sound offers us so many ways of conceptualising and experiencing complexity: the complexity of how we live together, with other species, how we use and construct space, and how those uses and constructions flow, interact and clash in complicated and overlapping ways. All of this unruly swirl can be experienced in a soundscape.
Spending time listening to this sort of sonic flux offers entry points for thinking our impact on the world, on each other and on other species – be that impact positive, negative or a complicated mixture. You could say all locations are hybrid in certain ways, but I suppose some are more obviously so than others. What I love about the most complex sonic environments is the multiple opportunities they contain for thinking encounter, co-habitation and the collective construction of space itself.
A.M.: Many of your works can be perceived as a kind of archive of places – not only of their present-day sounds, but also of the traces of the transformations they undergo. Do you think of field recording as a way of preserving the memory of spaces that may disappear or change completely over time?
K.C.: This archival function of field recording is not really one I work with. I am not thinking of my works as ‘capturing’ a moment in time and place in the ways often associated with an archive, or in any sort of neutral documentary tradition. And of course those neutral or objective or transparent associations attached to archives and ideas of documentation have radically changed too across many spheres. In that sense my works could be thought of within a sort of new documentary tradition, where fiction, editing, authorship and construction are recognised as key components of documentary.
With that said, of course there are aspects of sound recordings which relate to memory, mourning and the loss of spaces, habitats, species, ways of living and cultural practices. I don’t think my work is really typically circling those sorts of questions, but how we might mourn, collect traces of, or even rage against these losses are important things which sound and sound art can and has been used for.
A.M.: You use found or discarded objects to create instruments. Is there also a social dimension to this practice – a way of giving new life to things that have been overlooked or are no longer considered useful?
K.C.: Yes, I think so. Ever since my early days, what is not used, what is thrown away and not valued has been very important to me. This stretches right back to glitch music which can be readily seen as embracing the unwanted or typically discarded. This idea has always informed my approach to field recording: what is considered a bad recording? What is typically edited out? These are questions I like to circle and probe.
So with objects, yes, this is similar. I think there is also something nice in the gesture of using something from a location, where appropriate, to sound with or through as part of a work investigating the feeling of being somewhere in a particular moment of time. Found objects offer a level of tactility and presence too, which stands in contrast to field recording itself as something existing inside the device.
I am getting more and more into transducers and playback for this reason. The particular inflection objects themselves lend to sound is a beautiful area to think about and experiment with.
A.M.: Your latest projects feel more like journeys than traditional albums. When you’re working on a piece, is the sound itself more important to you, or the path that leads you towards discovering it? How does your way of listening to a place change when you move from being an observer to becoming an active participant within that space?
K.C.: Yes, a few of my recent albums have been explicitly focused on using journeys as the spine of the album, or the jumping-off point into the composition. I don’t think I separate the experience of the journey, how it feels, from the sounds I encounter. I can of course notice and think, ‘this is a very interesting moment sonically’, as I record, but when it comes to composition I am always centring a feeling: how it felt to encounter sounds, silences and moments as I made this journey.
So it is both: the journey itself, the infrastructure and logistics it engages, the encounters it produces and how these are audible or not audible in the recording, and the feeling or experiential aspects of undertaking movement through different locations.
As to this distinction between observer and participant, this is not one I draw actually. To observe, to withhold, to hold the self outside a moment is also a modality of participation. Just as to be silent is to participate in the construction of a particular sonic moment, so too is any decision to hold back, or to focus on the senses in an observational manner. All of these decisions play an active role in constituting a space in a given moment.
A.M.: For several years now, you have been increasingly using found or discarded objects to build instruments. Is there also a social dimension to this – an attempt to breathe new life into things that are no longer needed?
K.C.: Yes, I think it has this aspect to it. It also flows fairly readily from a field recording practice, which for me has cultivated a curiosity about locations, a sort of ‘I wonder what is down that small street?’ or ‘I wonder what it sounds like if I put that microphone there?’ There is a sense of investigating locations, or layers of activity in locations, using sound.
A similar sort of way of being is involved in thinking, ‘oh, what is this thing on the ground?’ or ‘could it make interesting sounds if I modified it in certain ways?’ So I think I see these two parts as connected. I have always loved just walking around different spaces, looking and listening and being in them really. Now I collect things and take them back to my studio and see if I can make them into some sort of sounding object as well.
And there is, of course, a social or environmental issue alongside this around all the things we throw away, and how these might be used more meaningfully or for a longer period rather than simply discarded.
A.M.: Rubbish Music seems to build on many ideas that were already present in your previous work. Has this project also changed the way you view a concert as an event?
K.C.: Of course the previous question did bring my thoughts to Rubbish Music, so I am glad you ask about it specifically here. In Rubbish Music this component of collection, re-use and re-sounding is at the core of the practice. Once you start thinking in this way about things discarded, it really opens up a lot of possibilities for making and experimentation, and it certainly has changed my experience of walking around the streets near my home. I am so often bringing things home, stopping to inspect things that have been dumped, making a mental note of things to return to collect.
As to whether it has changed my view of a concert, I think perhaps not through the use of objects, because I have used discarded or unwanted objects in my practice for a long time now. But in terms of the participatory aspects of Rubbish Music concerts and workshops, there has been a change and a stretching of my practice. We have workshops and concerts where we use video scores to co-ordinate collective acts of sounding with the audience. This is something I think is very meaningful and potent as a performance or event, and has changed for sure how I think about what a concert might involve.
A.M.: As an artist, curator, publisher and lecturer, you inhabit several different worlds at once. Do these roles ever come into conflict with each other, or do they instead complement and enrich one another?
K.C.: Well, they definitely conflict in terms of time and time management, so there is always that. Beyond that, I think in general they flow into each other in really generative ways. Teaching on topics has many times led me to experiment in my own practice in new ways, while knowledges from running my label or from my own work have regularly found its way into lectures. If anything, I have been surprised by how interesting and generative I’ve found teaching and devising classes for my work outside of teaching.
A.M.: I get the impression that, in your work, movement is just as important as listening. Do you see walking as a form of composition that begins even before the first sound is captured?
K.C.: This is a very interesting question. I don’t think I have explicitly thought of walking in that way, and I’m not sure I would separate walking out from other forms of movement as being particularly compositional.
In my work I am very interested in thinking about what sort of recordings, soundscapes or moments different forms of mobility produce. This can be seen to a degree in Vertical London, where I am moving in many different ways: the tube, trains, walking, running even. Not all of that can be heard, but what is heard are the recordings those particular mobilities have contributed to making possible.
I have a few ongoing projects where I experiment with going to the same place using different forms of mobility – walking, cycling, public transport – and comparing the different versions of the journey these produce in recordings. So in this sense I consider mobilities in all their forms elements of composition.
A.M.: Flaming Pines has always seemed to be more than just a record label – it feels like a curatorial project built around different ways of listening. When selecting artists and works for the label, what qualities or approaches are you looking for? Is there a particular sensibility or way of thinking about sound that makes a project feel like it belongs within the world of Flaming Pines? And after many years of running the label alongside your own artistic practice, has engaging with other artists’ work influenced the way you think about and create your own music?
K.C.: It is difficult to pinpoint one sonic thing, as the label has been very diverse in the works released. But if anything is at the centre of things, it is ideas. I can often feel from reading someone’s email that this is a work I could see the label releasing based on its conceptual core. Obviously the composition has to speak to that conceptual framing in compelling ways, but for me an interesting idea is crucial.
I have people quite often approaching me saying they have recordings from various locations they are keen to release, and this is basically always a no for me unless there is an extra layer to this. If the pitch is “I went here on a holiday and recorded some fascinating sounds and want you to release them” this is quite far from what I am looking for.
I am interested in releases which explore relations and positionality in regard to location or place, or which re-sound spaces in interesting ways – space as instrument, you might say. The first release this year was Jack Vickridge doing exactly this, attempting to turn a building into an instrument. Another recent release Tres Kilómetros by María Bulla and Juan Bermúdez explored their own relation via a walking and compositional practice, and Flaming Pines just announced Mark Peter Wright’s Field Crafting, a work examining how the field itself is constructed and engaged in recording practice.
These all circle the central concerns of the label – criticality, nuance, relation, connection and positionality.
A.M.: Finally, I’d like to ask about the future. Is there a place, landscape, or project that you still haven’t been able to realise, but that has remained on your personal map of sounds for years?
K.C.: I have a lot of projects I want to do. I am not someone who lacks for things on my ‘to do’ list, quite the opposite! Because of this, I think my aspiration for the future is not so much to go somewhere in particular, but to keep close to what moves me as a practitioner: to make works that I am proud of, which stretch me, which are fun and make life feel fuller, more connected and richer.
After 11 years in London, some of which were very busy in ways that left me feeling burnt out and run down as a person and an artist, I try to always think about my own response to making and activity. If something brings me joy and energy and excitement, then I try to notice that and put my energy there.
Kate Carr bandcamp
Flaming Pines bandcamp
Rubbish Music
Instagram
Spotify