There are storm records, and then there is "A Storm and its Aftermath". Where most works lean into thunder as spectacle - nature’s percussion section turned up to eleven - Kate Carr and David Donohoe instead take the quieter, stranger road. They don’t dramatize; they observe. They don’t thunder; they listen for the tremor before the crack, the bird’s sudden hush, the way a breeze gathers itself like an orchestra nervously tuning. It’s less Wagnerian tempest and more Virginia Woolf with a field recorder.

Recorded as a live piece on Sherkin Island during the Open Ear Festival, the album unfolds across 45 minutes like a patient meteorological diary. The storm doesn’t arrive until well past the half-hour mark, and even then it mutters rather than roars. What lingers are the in-betweens: wind dissolving into horn-like drones, shakers disguising themselves as raindrops, metallic echoes that slip into the soundscape as if they’ve always been there. The interventions are subtle acts of camouflage - until they’re not. Suddenly a clang cuts across the mix, and the whole environment seems to shift, animals scattering, amphibians answering, as though the island itself has been startled awake.

The brilliance of this record lies in its refusal to give us a clean narrative arc. Where does the storm start? Where does it end? Perhaps the aftermath is not on tape at all but inside us, in the way we listen differently after the fadeout. It’s an ecological sleight of hand: Carr and Donohoe don’t just portray a storm, they hand us the responsibility of carrying its residue.

Carr’s reputation as a field recording alchemist and Donohoe’s long history of threading instruments into electroacoustic contexts make this collaboration more than a one-off. Together they create a kind of storm-without-spectacle, one that insists that the most radical gesture in 2025 might simply be attention.

Storms always promise drama. This one delivers something rarer: the gift of duration, of patience, of being with the weather as it happens - not as a headline, but as a life lived among gusts, silences, and the afterglow of rain that never quite arrives.