Caught By The River have announced that Kate Carr will be given her recent album, I Had Myself A Nuclear Spring, a wider release via their Rivertones imprint on August 26. You can listen to ‘Rising Waters (Alone In The Dark)’, taken from the album, above right now.
The recordings for the album were compiled over a month that Carr spent alone in Marnay, a small town that lies 120 kilometres east of Paris in France’s Champagne region. The town is situated on the banks of the Seine and in the shadow of a large nuclear power plant, and Carr focussed her recordings on the wetlands, canals and tributary rivers that interact with both of those landmarks.
In the record’s liner notes, Carr describes the “astonishing landscape” of Marnay thusly: “I have loved the Seine since I was a child and read a book about an artist trying to paint the river, and when I arrived it was certainly doing justice to my memories of that book, swollen and mighty, perilously cold and formidable.
"In some places it was so flooded it was impassable. The river, and its series of tributaries and canals, some of which appeared to have been created to serve the nearby nuclear complex, had established vast marshes of bog, particularly in the area which approached the rear of the reactors, and water birds had arrived in their hundreds to enjoy this vast increase in habitat.”
You can read our very own Luke Turner giving the album a very positive review for Caught By The River here. The record constitutes Carr’s latest exploration of the relationships between sound, place and emotionality, themes around which much of her work has revolved since 2010.
Kate Carr will be making live appearances at The Good Life Experience, in Hawarden, Flintshire, on September 18, and at London’s Café Oto on September 22. For more information about the release, and to pre-order I Had Myself A Nuclear Spring, head here.
