Cat-No: fe012
Written, recorded & produced by Thom Carter
Artwork by Peter Prautzsch

Download ZIP (53 MB)
incl. artwork, 320kbps Mp3 files

There it is – straight and classic fieldrecording at its best. When Son Clairs (or Thom Carters) recordings reached us a few months ago we instantly knew that this would make a perfect release on Frozen Elephants. Carter manages to create an unique composition without any digital processing or treatment, simply using the present environment as instrument. All tracks were recorded in summer of 2009 in Rye (an ancient coastal town located in East Sussex, England), then cut, pasted, and layered, eventually forming a simple, quiet collage of St Mary’s.

“Of all this day, perhaps I will remember most the elderly couple (in track 2 ‘Crowds in the Church’) who stopped by a tombstone set inside the church and remarked on what a “good age” it was to have lived to at that time. To my surprise and delight, the old man then sang the words “backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards”, swaying to his own rhythm in a strange dance. At such times, a visual accompaniment to the audio would have helped to explain this meaning – but it is suffice to say that his gesture was towards the grave on the floor and then upwards to the giant pendulum of the belfry clock that hangs through the ceiling, swinging symbolically overhead like the hand of Time. As I sat there, unnoticed by them, observing and recording the sound, I was reminded of the inscription written on the outside of the church tower ‐ ‘For our time is a very shadow that passeth away’. To walk in on the Friday afternoon that I chose to visit St Mary’s, and hear the wonderful music, and the people wandering in and out, conversing, enjoying the atmosphere of the calm town and the cool stone building, was a beautiful experience. I hope this recording can evoke some of the atmosphere of that special place.” (Thom Carter)

01. Organ Overture 2:32 min
02. Crowds In The Church 7:28 min
03. The Bell Tower 4:38 min
04. Street Sounds 5:36 min
05. Organ Outro 2:00 min

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Review – Disquiet Blog

“Organs, yes, but much of Thom Carter’s field recordings taken at St. Mary’s, a church in Rye, England, are not of instruments but of people, and they show how people’s sounds can feel out the contours of a space. There are five tracks in all in Up on the Hill, which Carter released under the Son Clair pseudonym on the Elephants Music label. Tracks such as “Crowds in the Church” (MP3) easily take on the structure of music themselves, as they are revealed not as a solid block of ambient noise (voices, footsteps, mechanisms), but a many-layered audio track in which elements come to be like individual parts that rise and fall in the mix, slowly changing in time, dropping in and out of relative prominence. There is, as Carter writes in a brief liner note, bits of proper music, as it were, too, as when an “old man then sang the words ‘backwards, forwards, backwards, forwards.’” (Marc Weidenbaum)