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Kate Carr – I Had Myself A Nuclear Spring

A listing from my quarterly Guardian column 'Music You Missed', October 2016


Last year Brisbane expat and field recordist Kate Carr spent a month in Marnay-sur-Seine: a small town in France next to a nuclear power plant which turned into a temporary wetland after the river flooded. She roamed “muddy marshes filled with buzzing electrical towers, corroded machinery, shrieking birds and canals feeding a nuclear complex” using recording gear compromised by the area’s electromagnetism, creating the electrical hum that is this album’s sinister thread.

If you’ve ever doubted the capacity of sound art to elucidate chewy ideas, and not merely mood or some boffin’s confusing PhD thesis, Carr’s work will convince you otherwise. These pieces are full of space yet dense with a particularly modern dread. At times, to draw us closer, she plays a few reverberant guitar notes. Otherwise, it’s chirruping wildfowl, water, bass of indeterminate origin and always, the anxiety-inducing purr, buzz and whine of electricity. It is the soundtrack of psychosis for Chuck in Better Call Saul and a metaphor for the low-humming knowing that there’s no escape, not even in nature.

Flicker, Flow – Kate Carr (from I had myself a nuclear spring) from Kate Carr on Vimeo.

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My name is Kate Hennessy. I am a freelance arts and travel writer and music critic. I contribute to Guardian Australia, The Sydney Morning Herald/The Age, The Saturday Paper, The Australian, The Australian Financial Review, The Wire (UK), NME and more.

Latest posts

  • Floors of Heaven underwater concert (Woolloomooloo Bay)

    February 19, 2022
  • The ‘Yolŋu surf rock’ of Yothu Yindi’s next generation

    February 17, 2022
  • A gentle hidden gem: a visitor’s guide to the NSW far south coast

    January 8, 2022
  • ‘An inscrutable and open-ended riddle’: the life and art of Jeffrey Smart

    December 11, 2021
  • Trekking the Great Ocean Walk: ‘Stand with no land mass between your sweaty skin and Antarctica’

    December 7, 2021

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Tweets by @smallestroom

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