Rubbish Music - Fatbergs - CD

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Persistence of Sound presents 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 formed in 2022 to creatively transform domestic waste items into engaging sound art, revealing the latent value of discarded objects. Their first album Upcycling (Flaming Pines, 2022) was acclaimed for giving audible expression to the transformation possible through “imaginative engagement with even the most unpromising materials” (Julian Cowley in The Wire).

Since then they have run waste music workshops for non- musicians, created live soundtracks for public information films about litter and waste for Birmingham’s Flatpack Festival, and in October 2024 will unleash their live audio fatbergs on unsuspecting audiences at Germany’s famous Donaueschingen Festival.

1. The Fatberg Which Weighed as Much as Three Elephants [4:04]

2. The Boeing 747-sized Fatberg [8:53]

3. The Double-Decker Bus-shaped Fatberg [3:56]

4. Slithering Fatberg [5:51]

5. Huge and Disgusting 300 Tonne Fatberg [10:03]