avian-garde music #2

New on Room40, A Field Guide To Phantasmic Birds, by Kate Carr

https://room40.bandcamp.com/album/a-field-guide-to-phantasmic-birds

Release rationale: 

A note from Kate Carr

All the birds I never recorded, and some I did.

Re-imagined. Stretched and stuttering, glitching and morphing, swirling and sputtering.

Artifact and performance, digital bits all.

I imagine them swooping and calling in these scaffolds of sound I have made for them.

Gleaming amid technicolour jungles. Alive, unassailable; in a world we haven't ruined.

In a field recording I never made.

Further reading: a piece at the Quietus  by Daryl Worthington connecting Kate Carr and the other recent release Synthetic Bird Music (as previously covered in this avian-garde music series) to a larger continuum of "beak music" and bird-inspired composers

Reminded me of this Sarah Angliss piece "A Wren in the Cathedral"

As described here

"Another prominent color in Angliss’s palette comes from the theremin. Although Angliss deploys the “classic” theremin sound—keening and ethereal—she’s also devised a way of getting the machine to modulate bird-song samples. That trick pops up several times on Ealing Feeder, most notably on “A Wren in the Cathedral,” where the name of seventeenth-century architect Sir Christopher Wren is amusingly literalized as the liquid chirrup of that same bird, famous for its complex and piercing song."