Radio 3 feature
Pretty thrilled about this.
The amazing Late Junction team came to visit me in my studio a little while back, and this feature episode is the result.
Big thanks to Cat Gough and Jennifer Lucy Allen.
Airs Oct 10.
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New release.
Stratigraphy - Quartz Sand - Out Oct 17, 2025
Flaming Pines (CD/digital)
New release with Cath Roberts. This is our debut as Quartz Sand.
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A churn of electronic noise is flung into dialogue with the smeared and manipulated bleats of a seagull horn, the former like the grind of agricultural machinery, the latter like prolonged saxophone missives or doppler-arced racetrack noise. We encounter many moments like this throughout Stratigraphy: gushes of clashing colour, sudden illuminations of jagged edges. This is how Kate Carr and Cath Roberts resist the absolute fusion of their respective sound worlds, rekindling our awareness of their status as separate entities. Yet their dynamic is anything but antagonistic. Instead they delight in their assimilative limits, relishing the quiet charge of combining drones at crooked angles, or how creaking wood nestles awkwardly into sputters of raw synthesiser. Patiently and playfully, the players locate points of contact within each other that incite a certain murmuring and restless deadlock, pressing into the hard-stops of elemental disparity.
The album takes its name from the study of rock layering, which is centred on the law of superposition: in a stratigraphic sequence, the oldest rock layers are found at the bottom. Aptly, these two extended compositions feel adherent to a "vertical" sort of time; not just in how they refute linear forms of progression, but also in their stacking of brighter, crisper textures – chimes, jangles, squeals – atop the more primally-derived poolings of resonance and feedback. Samples embark on loops, slurp into reverse, belatedly reprise themselves. Linear time is crushed into a simultaneous jostling of disparate eras, with the vibrancy of the present tense perched atop a crooked catalogue of stalled histories.
Words by Jack Chuter.
New release.
A Storm and its Aftermath - David Donohoe and Kate Carr Flaming Pines (CD/digital)
Carr and Donohoe eschew the typical depiction of a storm as a linear escalation. Instead they illuminate the multitude of comings-and-goings that occur throughout its lifecycle: the quietening of birdsong, the thickening and dispersal of the wind, the ever-changing texture of the rain. The title itself is an act of misdirection. Most of the runtime concerns the storm’s prelude (it’s a full half-hour before we hear the first rumble of thunder), and we’re ushered into a fadeout before we even reach the aftermath. Thus we’re left to reevaluate the edges that constitute the composition and its concept. When can a storm be said to truly commence? What if the aftermath is for us to nurture within ourselves, in silence, after Carr and Donohoe have departed the frame?
The piece is based on a performance at last year’s Open Ear Festival, which takes place each year on Sherkin Island in Cork, Ireland. Using a combination of field recordings, instruments and natural materials gathered from across the island, the duo trace the transformation of a landscape as a storm passes through it. Their instrument performances often manifest as acts of camouflage, with horn-like drones woven into the actual howl of coastal gales, or shakers mimicking the early stirrings of a downpour. Yet elsewhere these musical interventions are sudden: deep, metallic clangs that ripple through the surrounding environment, sending mammalian bleats into retreat and calling amphibious gurgles forward, announcing the progression of the storm into a new phase. There’s no dramatic climax. The thunder is fleeting and subdued, caught within the crossfade between anticipation and consequence. uter.