David Donohoe and Kate Carr — A Storm And Its Aftermath

[Flaming Pines — 2025]★★★★★

Reviewed 22 September 2025by Josh Landry

English composer Kate Carr's collaboration with the Ireland-based David Donohoe is a carefully considered organic soundscape constructed out of field recordings and recordings of instruments such as flutes, chimes and other percussion. "A Storm and its Aftermath" is a single forty-five-minute piece, but undergoes many changes and miniature movements.

Within four or five minutes, we have established an eerie marsh aesthetic, which I might compare to Brian Eno's On Land, an album which also makes use of a similar sound palette. This album might be said to delve into subtler territory than the formative Eno opus, zooming into the micro-scale for much of the middle third of the long piece, focused on the delicate, tiny movements within close mic recordings. Gusts of air begin to swell again as time progresses, and there is a very pleasant sense of vast space, as well as an ear-massaging undercurrent of sub bass. The bleats of sheep appear now and again, amidst excerpts of the communal lives of birds. It is an interesting blend of the mysterious and the familiar, of electronic minimalism and the infinite complexity of the natural world; in this context, it can be hard to tell which is which.

One certainty is that the title is well chosen; the whole recording seems drenched by rain, blown askew by wind, thoroughly "wet" in every instance. The recordings are apparently sourced from Sherkin Island in Cork, Ireland, and the piece is intended, according to the liner notes, to depict the way the landscape is changed by a storm. It could not more perfectly reflect this theme, as the thunder claps, gale winds and torrents of rain can be heard thrashing in fury in the recordings, actively transforming all in their path through force and sheer duration.

The recording fidelity could be not be clearer and vivid. The sounds and their variety are countless in number, and the recording sessions used to make the piece must have been extensive. The recorders used are clearly stereo, as there is a wide, three-dimensional space on this recording at all times. It is certainly not a boring recording, as it feels every moment we are crossfading into an entirely new space, and yet the journey as a whole has a very fluid glide. There is a consciously ear-pleasing quality to every moment of the soundscape, which never fatigues the listener. The forty-five minutes is over in an instant. For more

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