Tom Carter & Christian Kiefer - A Rather Solemn Promise / From The Great American Songbook [2007/2008]

From The Great American Songbook CD

Preservation sure now how to package their releases: this second collaboration between Charalambides' Tom Carter and Christian Keefer comes housed in a lovely fold-out sleeve housing thick card inserts with liner notes for each song as penned by some of the avant-folk royalty these two are prone to hanging around with. Wooden Wand, Sharron Kraus, Glenn Jones, Tetuzi Akiyama and Tony Conrad are among the writers who pay tribute not only to Tom and Christian, but their source material - all of which comes from American traditional folk songs now in the public domain. As you'd probably expect, these two aren't always prone to sticking closely to their original texts, and familiar standards like 'Camptown Races' are given a fairly liberal overhaul. Tony Conrad writes at length about the interesting use of 'Doodah' in the original, citing this as one of the earliest examples of scat singing. That's the kind of info most albums just wouldn't bother giving you, but you'll be glad of the pains Preservation have gone to in providing context for these often very obscure songs (usually made that little bit more obscure by the adventurous cover artists). Highly Recommended.

A Rather Solemn Promise CD

Charalambides' Tom Carter teams up with fellow string alchemist Christian Kiefer for some Loren Mazzacane Connors-influenced spectral blues. Once you've got over the gorgeous hand-screened sleeves (courtesy of Badgerlore's Rob Fisk) you're in for the kind of freeform guitar duets that made similarly-minded outings (such as last year's excellent Tetuzi Akiyama & Donald McPherson head-to-head) such captivating listening. The tone varies between the rollicking Takoma-isms of 'Glass Palace' and the slide guitar weirdness of 'Song the Land Sings', via the ghostly banjo bust-ups of 'Snake River', with each piece delivered with a stereo dynamics setup whereby one musician takes the left, the other the right, giving a real sense of being in and amongst the performance. Tom Carter's guitar in Charalambides has always been enriched with a kind of starkly atmospheric resonance, and in Kiefer he's clearly found a likeminded artist. Consequently, it's a great pleasure to hear the two meandering through these psyched-up American Primitive discourses with such a gnarled authenticity.

boomkat

From The Great American Songbook [2008]

A Rather Solemn Promise [2007]

Christian Kiefer *Live* George Washington

Christina Carter - Original Darkness / Texas Working Blues [2008]

Christina Carter was born in the bayou city of Houston, Texas in November of 1968, and co-founded the group Charalambides there in December of 1991. Ever since then, she has deeply mined her own vein of sound-as-music with voice, guitar (both electric and acoustic), piano, and keys. For the past several years, Christina has utilized extended improvisational guitar passages within and without song-medley structures; re-contextualized certain Charalambides songs within the spare single guitar/voice form that birthed much of the group's music; and recently, investigated 'the song' as a thing unto itself, specifically concentrating on 'the word'- both in her own lyric writing and her interpretions of the work of other lyricists.

In addition to performing extensively in the US, UK and Europe as a solo artist, Christina has played and recorded in various groups and duos with Black Forest/Black Sea, Maria Chavez (as Weird Cookie), Loren Connors, Chris Corsano, Dredd Foole, Paul Flaherty, Gown (as The Bastard Wing), Shawn David McMillen, and Thurston Moore. She is also a permanent member of Babes On The Loose, Hot Assphalt, Scorces (with Heather Leigh Murray), Scorpiio Flower, Soft Hair, and Space(space)Child (a Spirit tribute band with Jessi Leigh Swenson).

Concurrent with her work as a musician, Christina has expanded her involvement in writing and visual art. Her poetry has been published by Digitalis Industries, The Ecstatic Peace Poetry Journal, Glass Eye, and Slow Toe Press. In 2007, her art piece Forever 21 appeared at Salon Mijangos in San Antonio, Texas as part of a concert/exhibit featuring Tom Carter, Warmer Milks, and Tetuzi Akiyama. Forever 21 was a labor of love and destruction- six of her handwritten diaries cut up painstakingly with scissors into miniscule pieces, which then filled a medium size yellow plastic shopping bag.

Christina currently resides in Austin, Texas. Her latest albums are the Charalambides CD Likeness (Kranky), the solo CDR Masque Femine (Many Breaths), and the solo CS Texas Blues Working (Blackest Rainbow). Her forthcoming releases are the solo CD Original Darkness (Kranky), The Bastard Wing CD To Contain Love (Ultra Hard Gel) which will both be released in the Fall of 2008, and the Scorces LP I Turn Into You (Not Not Fun) which will be released in July 2008. Also in 2008 she will publish Because Of Her In A Familiar Place (Many Breaths), a book of lyrics, poems and drawings.

manybreaths

Original Darkness [2008]

Texas Working Blues [2008] (part1/part2)

CHRISTINA CARTER - LIVE AT UPSET THE RHYTHM

Charalambides

To say that the words "unique" and "singular" are over-used in describing music is to state the obvious. To apply these words to the sounds created by the various duo/trio configurations of the Texas group Charalambides over the last decade plus would be understatement. To be sure there are numerous antecedents to their music; to deny this of any artist's work would be akin to saying that they are deaf. But they have surely broken new ground in the primitive/folk/mystic/improv/psych valley in which they toil. As Marcus Boon wrote in The Wire; "...here is a truly 21st century experimental ethnic music that explores quietness and stasis... in the same way that musicians in the second half of the 20th century discovered amplification, noise and speed."

Originally a duo comprised of Tom Carter (who had been playing guitar in the Houston grunt-psych band The Mike Gunn) and Christina Carter, Charalambides released a cassette called Our Bed Is Green on their own Wholly Other label in 1992 (later reissued on CD and double LP). The two Carters showed a firm grasp on the haunting nature of American blues and country, as well as a mastery of tape manipulation, a disregard for genre boundaries, and a marked tendency towards vertically stacked guitar drone. A full length album called Union was released by the Siltbreeze label, and many other releases followed, both as a duo and trio (first with Jason Bill, and later with pedal steel player Heather Leigh Murray). Although better known as a trio through their various tours with both Heather and Jason, Tom and Christina have returned to concentrating on their duo work in more recent years, fusing introspective, open-ended, and often spacious song structures with blasts of feedback and explosive sound often startling to fans familiar only with the band's deceptively low-key reputation.

In 2005, Tom and Christina met in California to record the tracks for their new kranky CD, A Vintage Burden. Besides commemorating the return to the duo format, the album represents a culmination of the threads of repetition and psychedelic song that run through much of the duo's work Although partially an homage to the clarity and ambience of 60s and 70s production and songwriting, the album retains the spook, space and mystery of even their most extreme releases: "Tom and Christina Carter here again showcase their seemingly innate ability to lock into a shared orbit across the darkening sky, their luminous drift scaled down to its essential, irreducible core." (quote from Pitchfork).

Tom and Christina are planning several tours of varying durations through the rest of 2006 and the beginning of 2007 (and beyond). Despite being a duo, their live sound achieves an energy and ferocity not often glimpsed on their releases, while maintaining the hissing delicacy of their most haunting studio work.

Christina Carter: electric guitar, acoustic guitar, voice
Tom Carter: electric guitar, lap steel guitar, acoustic guitar

kranky


























Album Discography:


01 - Our Bed is Green [1992] (part1/part2)
02 - Union [1993]
03 - Market Square [1995] (part1/part2)
04 - Historic 6th Ward [1996] (part1/part2)
05 - Charalambides [1997] (part1/part2)
06 - Houston [1998]
07 - Internal Eternal [1999]
08 - Branches [2001]
09 - CHT [2002]
10 - In Cr Ea Se [2002] (part1/part2)
11 - Live Hand Held [2002]
12 - Unknown Spin [2003]
13 - Joy Shapes [2006] (part1/part2)
14 - Strangle the Wretched Heavens [2006]
15 - Dead/Live [2006]
16 - A Vintage Burden [2006]
17 - Emerald Message [2006]
18 - Electricity Ghost [2007]
19 - Likeness [2007]
20 - Rose Thron [2008]


Brainwashed.com: The Eye - Charalambides (1 of 3)

Tom Carter - Skyline Grinder [2008]

The audio composed by the teacher Tom Carter, who works on a disc together with Bard Pond, bases on the perfect plain for experimentally flights of guitars with reverb, echoes and delay, slowly there are created figures that repeat the keynote of the pace to levels of mental leaks, astral colouring trips, you must be cautious and to understand(include) that the work of auditory digestion is expanded and opened for the creative thought in the inertia, bony(osseous) not to stimulate your trip with anything any more, understand that there can be side effects of addiction to this music.

El audio compuesto por el maestro Tom Carter, quien trabaja en un disco junto a Bardo Pond, se basa en la planicie perfecta para experimental vuelos de guitarras con reverb, echoes y delay, lentamente se van creando figuras que repiten la tónica del ritmo a niveles de escapes mentales, viajes astrales coloridos, usted debe ser cauto y comprender que el trabajo de digestión auditiva sea dilatado y abierto al pensamiento creador en la inercia, osea no estimular su viaje con nada más, entienda que pueden haber efectos secundarios de adicción a esta música.

Tom Carter, photos and montage by Graeme Thomson

TLR 047: tom carter — skyline grinder CD

released march 3, 2008 as an installment in the oscillation III series. sold only as a part of the set.

"skyline grinder" finds tom carter setting out in search of the infinite. he follows the quickest course - simply setting the ship's engines towards the very center of the sun. listen *closely* at the track's opening and you can hear him instructing the engine room that the goal is in sight and to push the engines just as hard as it takes. thirty-seven minutes later, you're right there with him.

Three Lobed recordings

Skyline Grinder [2008]

Tom Carter at 21Grand in Oakland