Artist Statement

My work centres on articulating our relationships with each other and the spaces we move through using sound. I am particularly interested in the ways sound contours our experiences of the world, and how we deploy it to connect, occupy, immerse and remove ourselves from locations, events and each other.

I am a field recordist, and this practice of recording in public spaces informs all of my work, alongside the building and use of instruments assembled from collected and discarded objects. Everything from vibrations caused by cars and footfalls to indistinct murmurs, music in public space, and the distant roar of sporting events has found its way into my compositions, performances and installations. In its variety, layers and obscurations, the ways in which we collectively produce our soundscape continues to inspire me.

As part of this interest, I have recently developed a practice involving the creation of sonic transects. These projects involve tracing trajectories through space using sound, field recording and performative actions with objects, offering an experiential account of some of the ways we move through and inhabit the world.

Bio

Kate Carr’s practice explores the encounters, textures and technologies entangled with field recording through movement, the collecting and use of objects as performance tools, and experimental recording techniques. She creates intimate, delicate and hybrid soundworlds that centre the interactions and forms of collectivity through which soundscapes are generated. Working across composition, performance and installation, her work draws on everything from vibrations caused by cars and footfalls to overheard murmurs, public speeches, music in public space, and the distant roar of sporting events.

In her live and installation work, Carr increasingly examines the ambiguities of field recording, developing a practice that blurs live foley work with field recording techniques. She builds and performs with instruments assembled from collected and discarded objects - ranging from scientific rockers, massage guns, bird horns, frog rattles and watering cans to bug clickers and hand-built noise boxes made from found materials such as rubbish, rubber bands and everyday detritus. Composing with these materials, she aims to trouble the associations of authenticity often attached to field recording, and its opposition to the sonic fictions of foley. Inspired by the layers, minglings and silences of our collective soundscapes, Carr is interested in composing works that probe sound as a way of understanding how we negotiate living together. She is particularly focused on hybrid soundscapes, where forest meets town, nuclear power plant meets wetland, and booming car stereos meet residential streets.

Kate regularly performs in the UK and Europe including Donaueschingen Musiktage (Germany), Rainy Days Festival (Luxembourg), Oscillations Festival (Brussels), Bone X Iklectik (Barcelona), Sonic Territories (Vienna), The Long Now at Kraftwerk (Berlin) and Supernormal in the UK. Other notable live performances include Barbican, Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, Instants Chavires (Paris) and AB Salon (Brussels). As part of her practice she also runs the sound art imprint Flaming Pines. In 2022 she founded the sound art duo Rubbish Music with Iain Chambers. Her music can be found on the labels Room 40 (Australia), Persistence of Sound (UK), Mana Records (UK), Helen Scarsdale (US), Hasana Editions (Indonesia), Longform Editions (Australia) as well as at her own label Flaming Pines.

In 2022 Carr also began composing and performing as part of the duo Rubbish Music with Iain Chambers where the pair construct and perform soundscapes from discarded objects. This live work has seen Carr and Chambers performing with shampoo bottles, toilet plungers, oven grills and rusty saucepans. Along with Cath Roberts, Carr is also in the new duo Quartz Sand, with Stratigraphy, their debut album out in 2025.

She has also been commissioned to produce new work for Late Junction and The Verb on BBC radio 3, and her works has been featured on BBC radio 6, The World Service, NPR and BBC radio 3. In print her work has been covered by The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Telegraph, Pitchfork and The Wire among other publications.

Carr is Australian, and lives in London.

Photo: Performing at Cafe Oto by Naomi Morlan.