Kate Carr on birdsong, extinction and the fictions of field recording
Sound artist Kate Carr discusses the making of her new album A Field Guide to Phantasmic Birds.
On a night in early spring, Kate Carr was in a patch of woodland in France with the intention, once again, of recording birdsong. Suddenly a large flock of migrating birds passed overhead, their wings whirring like a rolling wave. “It was one of the most incredible sounds I’ve ever heard,” Carr enthuses. “I will never forget it.”
If anything, 2023 has been bird season for the London-based sound artist. With hard drives full of dawn choruses recorded all over the world, Carr began examining her relationship to birdsong - an ever-present feature of city (and country) life, field recording workshops, and universal sonic shorthand for elegiac or pristine nature.
First there was False Dawn, released through Carr’s own Flaming Pines label, a Foley-inspired “experiment in artifice”, in which she assembled her own dawn chorus in the studio - or as she describes it: “a forest I have breathed and gestured into existence via horns and whistles, rattles and squeaky toys.”
In between finishing a PhD, working on Rubbish Music - her ongoing collaboration with Iain Chambers - and releasing an album in response to the fermentation process of sauerkraut, Carr also produced ‘Three Calls’, a contribution to Mappa’s Synethtic Bird Music - a 32-artist compilation of new music made in dialogue with the avian world.
Then in November came A Field Guide to Phantasmic Birds, a new album of what Carr calls “all the birds I never recorded, and some I did. Re-imagined. Stretched and stuttering, glitching and morphing, swirling and sputtering.” Embedded with the textural, layered and heavily processed sound are dawn choruses recorded in South Africa, Australia and the UK, which surface now and then like warped artefacts of a bird-less future. “I imagine them swooping and calling in these scaffolds of sound I have made for them,” Carr’s note on the album continues. “Gleaming amid technicolour jungles. Alive, unassailable; in a world we haven't ruined. In a field recording I never made.”
You’ve spent a lot of this year working with bird sounds – False Dawn, Synthetic Bird Music, and now your latest album The Field Guide to Phantasmic Birds. What is your relationship with birdsong?
I am not sure what my relationship is to be honest. I suppose I don't think of birdsong as separate to birds, or as a singular thing. For a long time I've been interested in birds. I've raised a few birds from chicks when they fell from their nests in Australia, and that probably got me very fascinated by them as creatures. But in my work I have been interested in performing, manipulating or re-staging natural sounds, and birdsong is a very prominent sound within our everyday environments. It also has a particular relationship with field recording, so these are probably some of the reasons I have focused on it.
One of the instruments listed on A Field Guide… is a “bird horn”. What is a bird horn and how do you play it?
A bird horn is an instrument used to mimic particular bird calls, often utilised by hunters. There are many different types. I have about 10 of them I think from owls to ducks to crows and many other types. I've used them for a long time in performance, but these days more and more.
Listening to A Field Guide… it felt a bit like you were looking back from the future to try and imagine what the dawn chorus might have sounded like. To what extent is extinction an undertone to this work?
Looking back from the future is an interesting take on the album. I can see how it might be experienced like that. As to extinction, I think it certainly is there as a theme, inevitably in our current situation. I think it is present in almost any recording of a non-human species, and in many recordings of humans too. It is a very bleak time in regard to the future of many species, including us, on this planet. I think this reality reverberates within my work, just as it does in my daily life. It is a sad and difficult thing to live with the destruction of the planet, its ecosystems, and peoples. I think some of the grief of that is part of the impetus for making this album.
What is the dawn chorus like where you live in London?
I have a traffic chorus I would say, rather than a dawn chorus. I live on an very busy intersection, and I can tell the time of day when I wake up by the intensity of traffic I can hear. There are some seagulls and pigeons that live around me, but I cannot regularly hear them over the sound of the traffic at dawn. Perhaps it is this lack which has led me to making my own dawn choruses!
The title of the album sets up a dichotomy between the taxonomical impulse and the emotional experience of nature. Could you tell me a bit about your idea behind it?
I think field recording obviously has a relationship, both historic and ongoing, to these taxonomic guides to different species, and this urge to collect, categorise, accurately record. So I was thinking about that, and what it might mean to play with that idea in the context of a wildly manipulated, distorted and in some parts performed version of birdsong. I have made a few works now focused on the fictions of field recording, and this album I think also is concerned with these sorts of themes.
False Dawn, an entirely performed version of a dawn chorus, I would position as investigating again some of fictions of field recording, and its relationship, particularly within nature documentaries, with foley work. I was curious about whether I could perform a dawn chorus, and what this might sound like, and it was that curiosity which produced that work, which began as a live performance. In a sense you could see that work as separating birdsong from birds, but you could understand field recording itself as doing that.
To what extent is A Field Guide… also actively challenging the assumption of field recordings as fact?
Most of my work these days is interested in thinking about field recording as a set of practices which produce a particular version of a location, experience or even species, and the relationships and practices which produce that recording and which also might be amplified or obscured within the recording itself. I think this sort of approach does clearly change how I think about field recordings. I find myself not so much asking, or not only asking, what is this I am listening to? But what relations and practices produced this recording? What can I hear of those? And what can't I hear?
Is there a danger that emerges when recording is treated as truth rather than perspective? Translating the idea of “seeing is believing”, do we also need to be a little more sceptical with our ears?
I think this is a good point. I would probably phrase it more as a need to think a little more deeply about what we are hearing. An obvious example of the constructed aspects of field recording come in the form of recordings of nature, and have an interesting analogue with photography when we think about what is cut out of the frame to render a particular version of the what is photographed. Recordings of nature leave a lot out, very often, and particularly they leave out the ubiquitous sounds of humans.
When I began field recording and going on field recording workshops the quest was to get a pristine recording of natural sounds without, for example, traffic noise, or aircraft noise. But of course the sheer effort involved in such a task underlines the fiction of it. There are very few locations where human activity cannot be heard for an extended period of time. I think there is value and interest in recordings without humans, of course, but I also think the ways in which unwanted human sounds are discarded presents a fictional version of the world in which live.
I guess on this topic I would be interested in exploring how we might take recordings which make more audible their selective and constructed nature. How might we record in ways where the circumstances of the recording might be hearable?
Something I’ve always really enjoyed about your work is its engagement with all the possible sounds that are out there waiting to be heard. Have you always been curious about the sonic world around you?
I think in my field recording work because I came to it, to a degree, via glitch music, I was always interested in a bad recording, undesirable sounds and what is often left out of recordings. So I think this for sure meant I was broader in the types of sounds I recorded and composed with than some other recordists. I love the layers of sound within a soundscape, the messiness of it, and the beautiful or strange or jarring moments that might emerge within that messiness.
I also hear a real sensitivity to materiality in your work – particularly that of human-made objects. There’s an image in Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter where she encounters objects gathered in a storm drain. Has her thinking been influential for you in how you approach the sonic possibilities of supposedly inanimate objects?
Even though I have not read Bennett's work particularly deeply her ideas are obviously very influential within the arts, and sound. I have only dipped into Vibrant Matter, although it has been on my reading list for ages actually, but I have been finishing my PhD, and she was not theorist I was using there so I know mainly the broad brushstrokes of her work, rather than the intricacies. Having said that, I can see the ways in which her ideas are very relevant to some of the work I am making, particularly as Rubbish Music. When I wrote the blurb which accompanied Rubbish Music's first album, which we called Upcycling, I remember thinking that the framing Iain and I had adopted for that project: our relationship to objects and their lifecycles, their transformations and reconfigurations, was one made more thinkable due to the work of Bennett.
Rubbish Music feels like it has an overtly political message about waste and what we perceive to have use value. Where do you stand on using sound to make statements and encourage change?
It is interesting to me the relationship between art and politics, because although I have been as an adult a very political person, and at points in my life devoted almost all my time to political activism, I don't think my work really has this overt political element within it. I don't think I would be very good at making this sort of work, although I think it is important and can be very powerful. I think you are right that Rubbish Music comes the closest to this, but even in this project we have focused on the soundworlds of rubbish just as much as on the issue of waste itself, and how much of it we produce.
In answer to your question, I guess I would say I think all artwork makes statements of one type or another, and in that sense all art is political whether overtly so or not. I think we are at a point in time when we desperately need to change, in so many ways, but I think creative work or sound work can play many roles in these much needed processes of change making. Not everyone can make or is responsive to artwork which overtly calls for change, just as not everyone finds value or comfort in work which might be seen as attempting to create a space of temporary respite from the world as it exists right now.
I don't place a huge amount of value on calls for people to make or like particular types of work, I don't think artwork should all be one particular way or another, or be experienced in specific ways either. But I do think it is critical right now for all of us to find ways to sustainably advocate for change, and the production or experience of art can play diverse and important roles in this process.
A Field Guide to Phantasmic Birds is out now on Room40.
Synthetic Bird Music is out now on Mappa.
False Dawn is out now on Flaming Pines.