Kate Carr records cities as people usually only experience them, as a specific body moving through a specific space. It’s personal and partial, and on Vertical London, that partiality is the point. Vertical London is her experience of the city from bottom to top on a particular day (New Year’s Day, in this case). It is such a specific way to move through a place, to hear the world through different strata, and to respond to those spaces. Invisible architecture becomes the arterial core of this material; the sounds of sewers, the grid, the electromagnetic hum, train echoes. There’s a lot happening across this album, but the emotional density underneath is what stays with me. Most field recording positions itself as documentation, but Carr’s work doesn’t. It’s a composed encounter, shaped by who she is and how a place (in this case, London) responds to her place in it. Vertical London makes that explicit.
Vertical London will be released on July 17 by Persistence of Sound. Kate Carr’s website can be found HERE.
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What are your earliest memories of sound and music? Were there particular moments that first made you aware of listening as something active, something you were doing rather than just receiving?
My earliest memories of sound relate to music really, rather than environmental sound or anything like that. At about the age of 9, I really pursued music with particular emotional content; I remember quite consciously feeling like particular songs were not quite affectively charged enough (not that I would have used this language of course!) for what I was seeking. At this young age, listening was put to use as a way of trying to process and understand my own emotional states. Music became a way of inhabiting certain emotional states and worlds which I could not at that age perhaps understand or inhabit otherwise, and even though I could not at all have put this into words, I was very deliberate in terms of what I was looking for, and what sorts of songs I wanted to listen to.
How did field recording enter your life and practice? Was there a specific moment or record that opened that door, or was it a slower accumulation?
It was somewhat slow. I did a masters course which covered a small amount of experimental music and discovered some important labels via that in the glitch sort of area, and I was very into that, which led me to Ikeda and raster noton and then Touch, Line, 12k and things like this. I have always been preoccupied with atmosphere and mood, so in my early works I sought to bring a sort of explicit emotionality to ambient and experimental works. I remember actually Sietse van Erve gave me one of my first reviews, I think on a website called Earlabs perhaps, and mentioned how emotionally centred my work was, and I felt really pleased with that and that this was certainly what I was interested in doing. Space and affect have always been at the centre of my life and thinking, and field recording was a fairly natural way to bring those two aspects of how I experience the world together.
London is such a loaded sonic environment. How long have you been recording there, and how has your relationship to the city as a sound source changed over time?
I have been recording here since I moved here 10 years ago. I moved here from Belfast, where I lived for 2.5 years, and before that from Australia, where I grew up and lived previously. I had been to London only once before for a day before I moved here. I knew nothing about London really except that, based on my one-day stay, I was not sure I would like it. I landed here and met my partner at Gatwick, I think it was, and we travelled together to Brixton tube station as she had moved a week or so before me. I will always remember coming up the escalators from the tube, and out to the streets of Brixton. It is an amazing experience to know something via feeling it rather than intellectually grasping it. I knew somehow that I would be absolutely fine in London as soon as I walked out of that tube station, and I have loved London basically ever since that moment. In terms of my relationship to recording it, I mean that has changed a lot. I tend to record journeys now, and movements through the city. I am more interested in moments, traces and gestures than gathering particular sounds. Since the pandemic, I have lived on a super busy road, so the sounds of the city are always with me indoors in at times very vivid ways, so this has been an interesting recording subject for me as well. I like to think about and listen to how the activities of the city reach me in sound in my living room. As I type this now, I can hear a siren, a pedestrian crossing, and some sort of road works. These aspects of city soundscapes and how they move between public and private spaces are really interesting to me.
You’ve got a new record on the way, Vertical London (New Year’s Day). It is, unsurprisingly, wonderful in part because the vertical journey concept is so specific and strange in the best way. How long had that idea been sitting with you before New Year’s Day gave you the occasion to actually do it?
It had been sitting with me for at least a year, I think. I was always planning to do it, but it is quite a commitment, and I also was quite keen to do it on a day which could somehow interact with the form of the work in an interesting way. I liked with Midsummer, the album I did previously about a journey from one side of London to the other on the summer solstice, that it brought together a journey and a particular time in ways which spoke to each other in interesting ways. I actually only decided New Year’s Day would suit this project perhaps two weeks before, so I began planning it quite late really.
The choice of New Year’s Day feels meaningful beyond just the symbolism of renewal. A quieter London, a particular quality of light and cold. How much did the day itself shape what ended up on the record?
Well, the choice of the day shaped it absolutely. A strange sort of dead but also alive day. Quiet yes, and very cold and dark, a very short day. A day when the symbolism is not encapsulated by what occurs in the city, which is very little relative to other days. New Year’s Day is an internal milestone really, which is left unmarked largely in public space, a day of sort of waiting for things to begin again. So I liked all these things about the day as a symbol and an event or nonevent. A sort of renewal or beginning which is waiting to happen, and the day itself as this long pause before that happens, a sort of extended inbetween. In terms of the sounds which I recorded, I mean some aspects were very specific to the day – there is one ‘Happy New Year,’ for example, there is also “Auld Lang Syne” being played on a piano at Crystal Palace overground station, so these feel very entangled with the date itself. Other aspects are more subtle: the quietness, who is out and about and who isn’t, the tourist presence as well is more marked than other days, perhaps as well.
Moving from roughly 20 meters below sea level to 240 meters above is such an interesting way to experience a city. What did that sort of vertical logic show you that maybe a more conventional route wouldn’t have?
Yes, I wasn’t sure how I would find it obviously beforehand, and part of the logic of it was how much travel from different parts of London it involved to reach these different heights. So that aspect of cities is something I always find interesting, the entanglements of infrastructure involved in getting anywhere. The sites I chose to record at were influenced by what I could get to in the short hours of daylight available on New Year’s Day and what struck me about them was how progressively more sterile and confected they became as I moved into the more privatised spaces of the London Eye (a revolving observation wheel on the Thames, and the Shard – a private viewing platform within a fairly controversial skyscraper in south London. The logic, I guess, moved from London as lived infrastructure to London as privatised aerial view, and that change was not an inspiring one.
I really love and appreciate how the album also traces infrastructure as much as geography (electricity, gas, data, water, etc.). These systems are mostly invisible until they make sound, so it makes a lot of sense to me. Were you listening for them specifically, or did they keep asserting themselves?
No, I listen for them for sure, and I had to prepare ways to record them ahead of the trip, so I knew I would be recording them. So the electromagnetic recordings of the Tube and other rail systems involved obviously a different microphone. I wanted to gather traces of the different systems which enable movement through the city, my own, but more generally. And beyond that, I am very interested in the infrastructures which work to constitute the city itself, so yes, the sewers, the power grid, data, etc. These more hidden components of the city are really central to the work which in certain ways seeks to ask: what aspects of the city itself and its inhabitants and visitors do I encounter by deciding to make this particular journey? What can I hear and also not hear about the systems, people, and other species which are entangled in this movement?
There’s a real range of emotional registers in how you describe the journey: fond, exasperated, frazzled, charmed, disappointed, hopeful. How much of that emotional texture survives into the recordings themselves, and how much comes through in the editing and arrangement?
Well, here I feel the answer to this lies in the particular encounter between listener and the work. My answer to this will not be the same as another person’s, and this is one of the interesting aspects of this sort of composition: what associations people bring to London as a city, city sounds in general, and then of course my arrangement of these and interventions musical and otherwise into the material will vary hugely. In terms of my intentions, I think I seek in composing to provide a framework with a particular momentum and a combination of openness and presence. This is my journey on a particular day, but the composition seeks to offer a space where other versions of this journey might be generated in that nexus between the sound itself and the listener.
The liner notes mention a version of London entangled with your own identity and recording practice. How conscious are you of that entanglement while you’re out recording? Is it something you can set aside, or is it always present?
I do not seek to set it aside; I have never hoped to do that as a recordist, and in fact I find this aspect of field recording practice to be something I don’t really agree with or find compelling. I never seek to document a space, I seek to compose works out of fragments of an encounter which involves recording in a location shared often with other people or more than human species. My recordings are always entangled with my identity both in terms of what I choose to record as well as how I am responded to as a recordist in public space. I completely reject field recording as a documentary practice in my work. Instead I see myself as using sound and a recording practice to convey a partial and authored account of my experience of being in and moving through a location.
I’m curious about the edit. You come back from a day like that with hours of material. How do you begin to find the album inside all of that?
I don’t actually record that much, and there were 10 or so locations plus loads of travel time where I also did record. I perhaps had two hours of material all up. I tend to record only in short fragments, and often while moving. The challenge is, as you say, how to make an album out of that. With Midsummer I composed it in sections, but this one I did it as one whole work at once. So it began with editing the fragments and arranging these, then beginning to manipulate and stretch some of the recordings to begin to cohere it a bit more into a continuous piece. Then improvising in relation to what was there and recording those improvisations, and another whole process of arranging these more musical elements, then adding a whole new extra layer of new fragments from the field recordings. It took a few months all up, although once I get into something I tend to work fairly fast. It isn’t something I can articulate particularly precisely, but I know how I want things to sound usually, and that largely comes down to how the material feels, so I don’t rework things hugely once I have this feeling in place.
What does your recording setup look like for a journey like this? Are you traveling light, or is there more gear involved than people might imagine?
Very light: an old Zoom H2 I think, and a Sony PCM D100, a small coil pickup, and I think I had my geofon as well, and that is it. All fits in a small backpack with plenty of room to spare. In this sort of work, the movement is the work, not specialised recordings of spaces or anything like that. The protocol of gathering everything in a day really limits it in a good way; the composed work must necessarily always be very incomplete and can only ever gesture towards a movement through space in sound.
Has making this record changed how you move through London? Do you hear the city differently now?
Not really; it has made me want to record more of the DLR, which sounded amazing, and it has encouraged me to undertake more experiments in terms of exploring different combinations of journeys, forms of mobility and transport, and recording technologies.
And, as always to close… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
My favourite sounds are always the elusive ones you are not sure you hear, which arrive on the breeze only to disappear or are masked by other sounds and only slowly emerge in consciousness. I like how sound reveals relations between our senses and conscious and unconscious processes — that song that is in your head before you realise you have actually been hearing it in fragments way off in the distance for the last five minutes. Sound offers interesting ways to think about what we know, don’t know, or refuse to know and the blurry space in between these poles.
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