Kate Carr - For Some Odd Reason

I made this piece because I started thinking about piped crowd noise as sporting events, and how widespread this had become during the pandemic. As I delved into this area I noticed there were many different types of sound streams that people were turning to as a source of comfort during this period. This work uses geophone recordings of city structures vibrating in response to footfalls and traffic, and samples four long youtube streams, one of a road, one of the streetscape of New York, one of bar chatter, and one of crowd chants at a football match. All the spoken material are comments left on these or similar long background noise youtube streams during the pandemic, and these are read by many different individuals, who are thanked below. I like how surprised and honest people are about how comforting they have found listening to these different types of background noise, and it is very moving to think that around the world many are cocooning themselves in sound in order to feel a little bit better, to pretend things are a bit more normal than they are, or to simply fall asleep.
Made in London and Pembrokeshire, Sept 2020.

Voices read by and special thanks to: [...]