The second album by Rubbish Music (Kate Carr and Iain Chambers), the duo upcycling waste into immersive electroacoustic music.
As we go about our daily lives, malodorous monsters are constructing themselves from our discarded detritus beneath the streets of our cities.
Built from wet wipes, nappies, food waste, fats and oils, fatbergs haunt us as a nightmarish return of the soiled, rejected and rotten.
Once these behemoths get a foothold in our sewers, they silently grow and spread, alerting us to their malignant presence via sewage overflows and blockages.
On Fatbergs, Rubbish Music take the stinking and roiling matter of fatbergs as their starting point. Across five compositions the duo turns to sound to examine the complex and unpredictable encounters which generate these gigantic conglomerations.
In this contemporary anti-fairytale fatbergs exist as trolls of our pipelines, amplifying a version of waste itself as an active presence. In this story flushing things away is not an ending, but a new beginning.
"Rubbish Music embody the elevating and transformative action of imaginative involvement with discarded materials. In the process they give audible expression to our ability to resist pessimistic resignation and to realise creative redeployment. Long may they recycle!"
— The Wire
Rubbish Music is Iain Chambers and
Kate Carr, a duo formed in 2022 to creatively transform domestic waste items into engaging sound art, revealing the latent value of discarded objects.
Kate Carr is known internationally for her work with field recordings, as well as using objects and experimental recording techniques. Her work often probes the ambiguities and perceptions of field recording, notably on her acclaimed 2024 album
Midsummer, London.
Iain Chambers' music often uses field recordings and specific locations as compositional material and inspiration, notably in The Eccentric Press for
Persistence of Sound, the label he launched in 2019, to create a new home for musique concrète and field recordings.
