2christina carter (photo: southern/kranky)
Interview w/ Christina Carter by pete nicholson.
Since meeting at a record store in 1991, Houston psych duo Christina and Tom Carter have put together one of the most sprawling and uncompromising discographies in the American underground, their meeting as spontaneous an occurrence as the music they have made. The Carters’ almost twenty-year odyssey through noisy improv, warm country-psych, woozy drones and dissembled roots music has seen a stream of the kind of records that can change your chemistry, filling you with soporific bliss, making you nauseous, the kind that can fly off in any direction, picking up influences from anywhere and then scattering them again.
Beginning with the quick-fire experimentalism of the recently re-released My Bed is Green, last year saw the duo return with Likeness, their latest record for Kranky and 23rd as the CHARALAMBIDES, a record that found Christina – with each record in clearer, fuller voice – transforming words from the American songbook into freeform ‘spiritual protest songs’.
On the eve of their Berlin tour, I spoke with Christina about the genesis of CHARALAMBIDES, their ‘haphazard’ songwriting process and writing songs without construction.
photo: southern/kranky
CHARALAMBIDES have travelled through so much terrain in their history – not to mention the rich catalogue of associated solo works and collaborations – a lot of it seeming like traditional music from a tradition that doesn’t really exist yet, if that makes any sense. I’m interested to know what the roots of your listening and playing were. Growing up, what were your musical backgrounds? What music did you get into?
C: As a kid, the type of stuff you’d listen to on 45s, and the radio, plus Glen Miller. Getting a little older, disco and soul...then the big branching off came in 8th grade with U2, Kate Bush, Adam and the Ants...then again in high school with Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Cure, Joy Division and Sonic Youth...then came seeing live music and finding good record stores, and working in one...There were always the little hidden habits like searching the radio for the music I couldn’t place, didn’t recognize, and sitting there amazed and transported to an unfamiliar feeling. Once figuring out that that was a directable curiosity and energy the world was completely open.
What bands/projects did you play in before the CHARALAMBIDES? Did they bear much similarity to what happened when you guys started playing together?
C: I didn’t play in anything before Charalambides.
What was the underground Houston scene like in the early 90s?
C: Totally self-consciously unself-conscious. There was a bad attitude and at the same time a real good-time feeling. It was about drinking mostly. It’s hard to remember...When I think back, it seemed pretty limiting which is why we didn’t care so much about playing live there. At the same time it felt inspiring. There was just a difference in mind-set to now. We felt isolated, backward, and ignored. There was an emphasis on being loud. There was a lot of self-deprecation. The most common attitude seemed to be “I don’t give a fuck”.
When you came together, did you have much of a feeling for a distinct aesthetic/sound you wanted to carve out, or were you more responding to a chemistry between each other and just letting it evolve?
C: It was a chemistry that we went with in large part, but there were some ideas – more in the negative, as in what we didn’t want to be or do. We didn’t want to be a band that practiced every week or that played rock’n’roll or that felt like we needed a drummer. Basic stuff. It was a reaction to the party scene, and the music that was popular in Texas at the time.
I read somewhere you described your music as ‘slow-motion, microtonal, improvised, psychedelic, folk music.’ Do you identify yourself with America’s folk or blues traditions, even if these days – as terms at least – they’ve been subsumed into a morass of mass-marketed schmaltz?
C: Hmmm, uh no, not really. It depends on what you mean by ‘identify’...I’m inspired by a lot of things about those American traditions, but likewise by other traditions. More so, the identification for me is with the punk/art/weirdo/lo-fi/loner scene(s). The more modern/urban, cheap electronics/concrete, alienation/frustration side of things.
What’s the songwriting process like for you, especially these days living in different places?
C: We’ve never had one process. It’s always been continuously changing even when we lived in the same place, so it continues to change. ‘Song writing’ makes it sound a bit more together than it really is most of the time. It’s usually fairly haphazard. There’s instances of traditional song writing like the album Vintage Burden, but they’re few and far between.
How does your approach differ as a duo from when you were a three-piece?
C: We’ve been more likely to play songs, or to improvise things that sound like songs that were written as opposed to play pieces that wear their improvisation on their sleeve.
How much do your many collaborations with others inform the your playing?
C: I honestly don’t know...there aren’t that many collaborations for me these days. They’ve certainly helped my confidence and given me a window into a different perspective, but if anything they’ve solidified certain personal stylistic things that have been circulating through what I’ve done since the beginning.
With Likeness, you headed to the American songbook and reconstructed the lyrics to create your own ‘spiritual protest’ songs. What was the motivation, the impetus for heading back to traditional words for your songs?
C: I don’t know. Part of the idea was to internalize the songs, to make it feel to me as if they weren’t lyrics out of the past, and to make it feel to me that they weren’t lyrics from an outside source. There was no intention to romanticize the past, quite the opposite. The intention was more to collapse time. I look at it akin to methods used in visual art or film, or acting, not so much music or paying homage to a tradition.
A lot of your music is based on one or two notes or chords, drawn out and illuminated until the song takes on something quite apart from the roots of its construction. Is there something in this kind of simplicity that you’re drawn to, perhaps as a base for exploration?
C: Yes, not as a base, but for the thing itself. That’s it – it’s one or two notes or chords – nothing else. There’s no construction. Or, when it’s most ‘successful’ there’s very little urge for construction.
charalambides (photo: southern/kranky)
Your sound, to me, really comes across as the type of art that really tries to express sensations, feelings, thoughts, beyond words. Particularly in regard to your use of wordless vocals, is this something you shoot for in your music?
C: Funny that the last two Charalambides’ albums and my next solo album are all word vocals, so it’s an interesting question. I’ve been doing the wordless vocals some on Many Breaths stuff...Yes, I mean, I’m never really am interested in telling a ‘story’ so to speak, a narrative that’s about exactly the words on the page. So, words or no, the approach is something more than words. But, it’s not that the realm beyond words is wordless. In other words (ha ha), it’s not anti-idea, anti-language, anti-word, anti-lyric, anti-concept, anti-human, anti-communication.
Ultimately, it’s about a concept that is an idea that takes words to express. I’m telling someone something. It’s not all instinct, spirit, guttural, urge...uh, yeah...the wordless vocals are an ‘and’ proposition. I think the phrase ‘more than’ words describes it better than ‘beyond words’. I think they are places that co-exist...Not that I don’t like narrative type songs. It’s just not my stronger point...It’s about a mental-emotional plane...Sometimes I think of the ‘wordless’ vocals as being words, just at a different magnification.
I read an interview from a while back where you mentioned you didn’t like touring so much. How do you feel about it these days?
C: I’m on the downward side of a curve right now. Touring’s been a little more difficult the past few times. But still, there’s a lot to be gotten out of it. It’s mainly that it’s just physically harder. In the past, it wasn’t so much the touring, but the playing live that was super intimidating and problematic. I get to where the approach needs to change, and it’s a matter of finding what’s next.
When you play live, is there much intention to play songs from the records, or are they just a starting point to do something more open-ended?
C: There’s an intention to play songs from the records as of late, but yeah, not exact versions, more like starting points to do something open-ended. The feeling changes from night to night, consequently so does how we play a song.
With everything the internet has brought, has the kind of improvised, experimental music you guys are so much a part of been able to reach a greater audience, or change in any major way?
C: Aaaaaaaaah, no and yes...Yes, it has reached a greater audience. There are definitely more small handfuls of people scattered across huge distances then there were in the past. It’s just easier to stay in touch with people. Easier to let people know something exists at all. There are more esoteric differences as far as attitudes, realities too, which yes I talk about with friends sometimes, but it’s not an easy topic to approach without sounding like some kind of curmudgeonly self-defined “old-timer”, so I’ll forgo that here. Just imagine a time when etc...Altogether it seems pretty positive.
What music or art is inspiring you at the moment?
C: The art and life of Victor Brauner, the movie 3 Women by Robert Altman, and I’ve been listening to Mauve Sideshow an awful lot (again), along with the new(est?) Richard Youngs Autumn Response. And last night I saw Tetuzi Akiyama play a solo acoustic guitar set, as well as some other people that played like Greg Kelley and Dave Dove and Bhob Rainey. All good, nice, people along with being inspiring musicians. But, this younger guy Ryan Ritzig played and he really kicked it out, if you know what I mean. You know, it was kinda cool because he wasn’t so precise as everyone else. He was rough in a way. Singing through his guitar pickup, using feedback, manipulating effects. There was this struggle maybe of not wanting to be so precise as everyone else, or not being able to at this point or on that night: effects a little too loud, feedback verging on getting out of control, banging on the instrument a little too forcefully. I get inspired by that kind of ‘drama’. And that sense of being a little uncomfortable. Don’t get me wrong, what he was doing sounded great. That’s the kind of performance where I think, ‘I wonder what me and this person could do in a collaboration? It could be interesting!’. And just got back a book I had on loan to someone for a while on Wallace Berman and Semina Culture, so I’ve been flipping through that again. He’s one of my favorite artists along with Bruce Conner.
What are your plans for upcoming releases, collaborations etc.?
C: On this Tuesday I’m going in to Terra Nova Studio in Austin to do final mastering on the next solo CD Kranky will release. It’s gonna be called Original Darkness. Other than that, Blackest Rainbow in Nottingham, England’s going to put out a solo cassette and I’m planning a few things on Many Breaths. First, Masque Femine, a CD-R of vocal songs and second, Because Of Her In a Familiar Place a low-tech ‘book’ of poems and such. As far as collaborations, Not Not Fun out of Los Angeles has a Scorces double LP slated for May and Ultra Hard Gel also from California, but somewhere more Northern California, will be putting out The Bastard Wing’s second and last cd To Contain Love. Finally, at SXSW on the Signal To Noise showcase Shawn David McMillen and I are jamming on some of the songs from Masque Femine.
--- Pete Nicholson
Charalambides / Time Life (of Vanishing Voice) / Datashock:
March 27, 2008 at West Germany, Skalitzer Strasse/Kreuzberg.
charalambides/Datashock/Time Life
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DATASHOCK
Datashock sind ein rituelles deutsches "Neo-Hippie-Grusel-Folk Kollektiv" mit wechselnden Mitgliedern und einem immer wieder sich neu erweiterndem Musikerkreis. Datashock definieren sich nahezu vollständig über ihre psychedelischen, multidimensionalen Live-Improvisationen, mit Wurzeln im Kraut-Rock der 70'er, die sich hemmungslos mit zeitgenössischer elektronischer Musik und psychotischen Drone-Landschaften paaren. Das Ergebnis sind gedämpfte, schwindelig wie schwüle Schwingungen mit vielen komplexen Schichten und Ebenen von schweren, unmittelbaren Wellen aus elektronischen Klangspielereien und komischen maskenhaften Lautmalereien. Immer wieder wird dieser seltsam anmutende Klangteppich von realitätsverschobenen Flüstergestalten und Stimmeinlagen durchbrochen und neu kreiert. Hier wird jeder Schritt zum nervösen Abtasten des wabernden, sumpfigen Urwaldbodens.
datashock live/promo
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TIME LIFE
Time Life, comprised of Vanishing Voice members G. Lucas Crane and Heidi Diehl, boils the psychedelic improvisations of the Vanishing Voice into more structured space music, using tape manipulation, guitar, and voice. Wrapping sounds from various sources into a concocted aural remedy from reality, a psychedelic blanket sheltering you from the outside world. Heidi lends her voice and dripping dream guitar work to the powers at hand, juxtaposing heavy bass with light whispers and shimmering strings with deep murmurs. There's a lot psychedelic bands around today, but anything connected to the Vanishing Voice and especially Time Life are at the forefront of the movement, if anyone is.
time life/promo
