Vertical London (New Year’s Day)

Kate Carr is known internationally for her work with field recordings, as well as using objects and experimental recording techniques. Her work often probes the ambiguities and perceptions of field recording, notably on her 2023 album, False Dawn. “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.” Kate previously developed the idea of a sonic transect – a sound sampling along an axis – for an album made on a Spanish mountain in 2017, From A Wind Turbine To Vultures (And Back). The idea explores sonic niches, the ways they flow into each other and can be stitched together in an attempt to convey the changing aspects of – in that case – the terrain of a mountain and Kate’s journey up and down it. Now, following Midsummer, London, Kate’s 2014 album for Persistence of Sound, Vertical London (New Year’s Day) explores a vertical trajectory through the city she calls home: “On New Year’s Day this year I set off from my home in Loughborough Junction to undertake a rather idiosyncratic journey. For a long time now I have wanted to try and trace a vertical trajectory in London – and New Year’s Day with its connotations of renewal and starting-over seemed just the time to attempt to flee upwards, if you will. The spine of this album is that journey from roughly minus 20 metres below sea level to 240 metres above on that cold, short wintry day. It was a quiet day, by London standards, but not silent. It was still a London of some bustle and activity. Of overheard moments and chance encounters involving delivery drivers, commuters, tourists, taxis, tubes, buses, retail workers, joggers, crows, pigeons and foxes. As I traced my ascending route from the depths of the Victoria Line, to the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, Soho, Bloomsbury, and upwards to Kilburn, Hampstead, Crystal Palace, The Eye and The Shard I was struck by how reliant on all sorts of infrastructures this trip was. Electricity, gas, data, food, water, all of these systems, some silent, others audible, were intertwined in one way or another with my movement. The recordings I took move from the electromagnetic hum of the underground and the DLR, delivery trolleys and bicycles, the echoes of public piano recitals, quiet parks and ambiences from the privatised spaces of the Eye and the Shard. This is just one moment in London. One journey on one day by one person. A version of London which is entangled with my own identity and recording practice. But it is also, I hope, a rendering of the city which might in its strangeness or familiarity reverberate with the version of London you carry inside of you, whether this is drawn from experience, fantasy or indifference. My version is by turns fond, exasperated, frazzled, charmed, disappointed, hopeful, engaged and alienated. All the colours of experience for this most intimate and visceral of relations: a journey through the city I call home.”