Kate Carr

dawn, always new, often superb, inaugurates the return of the everyday
Kate Carr
July 2021

dawn, always new, often superb, inaugurates the return of the everyday is a limited edition vinyl by Kate Carr, produced as part of the first artist residency at FormaHQ. The album presents 10 compositions that remix field recordings captured during the building works of the new space. Recorded with highly sensitive equipment such as geophones, Carr samples the architectural and geological shifts on site – from the gurgling of pipes to deep vibrations of the Earth’s crust.

Join us for the launch event at FormaHQ on 29 July 2021 at 6.30pm, featuring performances by Kate Carr, album collaborator Graham Dunning and sound artist Hannah Dargavel-Leafe.

The songs reshuffle the vibrations of grates, lamp posts, walls and drains, alongside the passage of cars, pedestrians, cyclists, and buses caught by Carr’s contact mics – familiar sounds that become unrecognisable once sampled. Slices of field recordings were converted by Graham Dunning into rhythmic samples embedded throughout the album. The title and track list reference Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Rhythmanalysis’, a collection of essays addressing the rhythms and sound patterns of public space.

The vinyl is lathe cut, a technique that engraves the music into the polycarbonate discs while playing in real time. The sleeve was developed with designer Louise Mason a.k.a Sawn Off and holds the record between two perspex disks. All elements are assembled by hand, making each vinyl a limited-edition artwork. The record will be available to purchase at the launch event on the 29 July as well as on the Forma online shop the day after.

Carr’s work explores our complex and contradictory relationship with the natural world. Her music blurs the boundaries between instruments and field recordings, underlining the intersections and overlaps between nature and culture and the myriad of incomplete ways we attempt to make sense of these terms. It explores place and non-place, being and imagining. A residency period originally conceived pre-pandemic to travel along multiple lines of connection, became a meditation on the sites of transformation over a period of enforced social distancing and global change.

“This is an album which begins with a London roundabout in its exploration of connections, lost rhythms and new beginnings. The pandemic has underlined that what we thought of as the every day, is actually something quite specific and special. I made this album on and off through the lockdowns of 2020–21 and now as we hopefully emerge into something else, I have found myself asking what type of every day this new dawn will bring.” – Kate Carr

Launch live set at FormaHQ