Kate Carr - The Story Surrounds Us (2017) Hi-Res

Kate Carr melds the exquisite details of her field recordings with an ephemeral approach to the song. this australian has relocated herself to london after many trips around the globe. with each orbiting journey, she has collected innumerable sounds from the urbane to the aqueous and from the frenetic to the sublime, contextualizing all of these into compositions rippling with primordial melodies through guitar, piano, and electronics. the story surrounds us follows her highly acclaimed albums i had myself a nuclear spring (first released on her own flaming pines imprint in 2015) and carr's debut for helen scarsdale in 2016, it was a time of laboured metaphors. emblematic of her work is a gentle dislocation between the environmental sounds and her drone-dub ellipses of somnambulant melody. the clatter of a frozen dock or a vibrational shimmer from rustled objects or the unintelligible whispers displaces the sense of self amidst a sea of disparate symbols and coded thought. more a travelogue in and out of one's own body than to any particular place. carr suggests "in a way, it is about restlessness, an uncomfortable tossing and turning in all these many different places, a struggle somehow to forge a connection between my own internal world and all these places and persons i have encountered. i think this holds a sense of unease and strain, with both beautiful and failed moments of intimacy and connection which are made either possible or impossible in the difficult and distorted context of being away. it is quite sad, really." look to carla dal forno, alan lamb and those moments of clarity in the shapeshifting ethos from jewelled antler for neighboring sounds to kate carr's chimerical compositions.

This album involved a lot of travel from ólafsfjörður, iceland to sian ka'an in mexico, to falun in sweden and velez blanco in spain. special thanks to listhus artspace, biospheres soundscapes, joya arte + ecologica for hosting me in iceland, mexico and spain respectively, to lina sofia lundin for having me to sweden, andrea ancira garcia for letting me use her wonderful field recording taken in mexico in '1001', to jim haynes for his support in releasing this, and to tanya serisier for her support in all things.