Stratigraphy by Quartz Sand

A churn of electronic noise is flung into dialogue with the smeared and manipulated bleats of a seagull horn, the former like the grind of agricultural machinery, the latter like prolonged saxophone missives or doppler-arced racetrack noise. We encounter many moments like this throughout Stratigraphy: gushes of clashing colour, sudden illuminations of jagged edges. This is how Kate Carr and Cath Roberts resist the absolute fusion of their respective sound worlds, rekindling our awareness of their status as separate entities. Yet their dynamic is anything but antagonistic. Instead they delight in their assimilative limits, relishing the quiet charge of combining drones at crooked angles, or how creaking wood nestles awkwardly into sputters of raw synthesiser. Patiently and playfully, the players locate points of contact within each other that incite a certain murmuring and restless deadlock, pressing into the hard-stops of elemental disparity.

The album takes its name from the study of rock layering, which is centred on the law of superposition: in a stratigraphic sequence, the oldest rock layers are found at the bottom. Aptly, these two extended compositions feel adherent to a "vertical" sort of time; not just in how they refute linear forms of progression, but also in their stacking of brighter, crisper textures – chimes, jangles, squeals – atop the more primally-derived poolings of resonance and feedback. Samples embark on loops, slurp into reverse, belatedly reprise themselves. Linear time is crushed into a simultaneous jostling of disparate eras, with the vibrancy of the present tense perched atop a crooked catalogue of stalled histories.

“Flaming Pines is itself a topography of hidden global sounds." The Wire.

We are a label focused on field recording, sound art and experimental ambient music.

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