just me, perhaps the term 'band' a bit grandiose...
Influences
oval, pansonic, carl craig, francisco lopez, snd, dj screw, richie hawtin, farmers manual, microstoria, kim cascone, ryoji ikeda, fsol, autechre, pole, the orb, orbital, taylor deupree, richard chartier, alva noto.
EARLABS
Kate Carr - First Day Back
RATED: 8.3 / 10
It must have been about 8 or 9 years ago I first got in contact with what people would call glitch or micromusic, since I have been liking this kind of music and always kept a warm place in my heart for the skipping cd’s, rumbling speakers and clicking modem sounds. Only thing that sometimes bothered me (and still does) is how cold and emotionless this at times can be. The music is in most cases totally inorganic. Especially when feeling down or tired and you want to hear soothing music, it’s not always the most suitable. Luckily there are some amazing exceptions to this and now I want to add a new young artist to this list: Kate Carr.
Kate Carr is a young lady residing in Sydney, Australia. After several mp3 releases the German label Retinascan releases her first real album First Day Back. On the cd of this lady we hear several elements back that can directly be derived from glitch and micromusic, but the outcome is completely different.
All the songs from First Day Back are build up from acoustic and electric guitar sounds and samples (some sound even familiar, but I might be mistaken here). All the sounds are cut up and rearranged to lead their own life. Just as with music done by oval and fennesz melodies are created with the snippets of sounds, but instead of grains the pieces used are much longer. The music is organic giving it some own characteristics. While the music shows the elements of micromusic to really call it this doesn’t pay the respect it deserves. It’s almost as if micromusic steps away from the laptop and gets a human face.
The album as a whole almost seems to tell a story. Between the songs their really seems to be a line building up from one track to another. As single tracks wouldn’t work, but as a whole it’s a great collection of music.
With First Day Back Kate Carr shows she can easily match with some of the big names in the genre, especially because her more emotional approach to glitch music.
Sietse van Erve
CYCLIC DEFROST
Kate Carr - First Day Back (Retinascan)
There was a time about a decade ago when there was a sense of foreboding in a lot of the music of the underground. Tricky used the name given to this phenomena for one of his albums of the era - Pre-Millenial Tension. I was somewhat a fan of the movement at the time, and was a little disappointed when the Y2K bug failed to eventuate, armageddon remained in its future nest and everything, even the underground, followed the r’n'b leaders into an extended state of hedonism. Which is why I’ve been a fan of Kate Carr’s since first hearing her free netlabel releases a few years ago. She puts darkness back where it belongs and a sense of something creeping just around the corner is ever present in her work.
First Day Back, her first full-length album, sees her branching into more traditionally musical terrain than she’s explored previously. There’s no danger of falling into the mainstream though! Most of the tracks sound as if they are constructed from carefully selected samples, with acoustic guitar textures prevalent, as opposed to her normal blend of various field recordings. Starting with a track titled ‘Guitar Endings’ gives a fairly good indication of what is going on. With that title it could possibly be a collection of the final chords of a number of tracks, strung together without discernible rhythm, using repetition, dark reverb, extreme time stretching and pitch shifting. ‘Takeaway Sichuan For One’ adds a vague semblance of rhythm, only so that it can then undermine rhythmic expectations as it progresses. By the time of ‘Monday Night, Far From Over’ halfway into the album, the cutting and splicing of guitar figures is so rapid and fractured that what has, up until now, merely given a sense of unease, now becomes genuinely threatening, without ever really raising much above a whisper.
While there are 13 tracks on the album, it very much works as a suite, a single movement of sound, rising and falling in fervour, but with an ever present menace and the same few familiar timbres - acoustic guitars, the odd piano notes, reverb tails - explored consistently throughout. Snatches of what could almost be classic, mellow rock, almost break through here and there, only to be sent chasing their own tails as new ambiences jostle for position. By the time of ‘Xen’ nearing the end of the album, the sound approaches pure drone, but with textural shifts halting any sense of the work becoming background.
What is most striking to me about the album is the ever present sense of dread. On a purely aesthetic level, it could almost be a critique of the vacuous edge of new (and old) western folk. Perhaps it is a critique of the culture that has left self-criticism behind in search of escapism. The earlier reference to Tricky applies in terms of sound as well - I could imagine his deep drawl conversing with itself over the stumbling almost-rhythms. I also get a sense that I’ve not yet completely pinpointed exactly what Carr is doing in First Day Back, but the sound is so transfixing and hypnotic that I am consistently sucked in to deeper emotional attachments to it.
Adrian Elmer
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