TAKE WARNING RAIN - rain dance redux for the Anthropocene (Human Geography Recordings, 2023)

Digital and physical album available here.

In August 2022 a new anniversary was announced by a group of environmental scientists in the Env. Sci. Tech article “Outside the Safe Operating Space of a New Planetary Boundary”: the moment at which all rainwater, everywhere on earth, had become irreversibly unsafe to drink.

In the 22-track tape TAKE WARNING RAIN, Cutler returns to nostalgic ideas of rainwater’s purity and purification, completing an unofficial trilogy with her earlier albums connected to meteorology, melancholy, and pathetic fallacy. The cliché of emotional self-expression in rain (from “tell it to the rain” to “tears in the rain”), as well as the reliable metaphor of threat as a gathering storm-cloud, are both transformed in our new world of contaminated/infiltrated precipitation.

Field recordings in these songs include sea rain at the Pen ar Ran uranium mine site at 4 a.m. low tide (Brittany), thunderstorms in the remote caves of the solar alignment of La Vall de Gallinera (Valencia), and a deliberately waterlogged phone microphone in Sehuaya canyon, home to the last living river in Mexico city.

The album is also inspired by histories of rainfall calculation as a foundation of predictability, from early record keeping to modern algorithms/computerisation. The bonus extended online track ‘the rain it raineth every day’ has no original sounds, only an AI’s attempt to synthetically recall the sound of rain.

…and me / Remembering again that I shall die / And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks / For washing me cleaner than I have been / Since I was born into this solitude (Edward Thomas)

released November 24, 2023 (images above from album release talk for the the LCC/CRiSAP Sound Arts Lecture Series)

All tracks: A. Cutler except track 6: A. Cutler and Cabbaggage.

All images & tape cassette artwork generated by Cutler in collaboration with an AI trained on her fieldwork water samples as well as archival & public domain pluviographs, almanacs, & rainfall annotation.

1. rain dance 1 (spinning tops) 01:47

2. wash my face clean 03:37

3. the small rain down can rain 03:43

4. party in the rain like it’s 1999 03:36

5. Qin Jiushao’s mathematical theorem of rainfall 03:05

6. like it never was 02:03

7. the vanquished storm 04:26

8. goodbye, reprise 01:50

9. vapour trails 06:21

10. forks’tiyunsdown’ards 02:39

11. here comes the rain 01:18

12. rain dance 2 (cave scraping 5 a.m.) 03:27