Since their ungodly-good late-1998 longplayer, Houston, Texan drone/folk
darlings Charalambides have somehow managed to seem like they've
disappeared, whilst actually being hyper-productive. In that time, Tom
and Christina Carter have issued no fewer than 10 records of various
forms — live recordings from various "eras," limited-run CDRs, lathe-cut
LPs — on their own Wholly Other label. But all of these have been
released in such scarce supply, and in such under-the-radar ways, that
Houston still stands as their last real proper album — meaning,
y'know, one recorded in a studio and issued on a record label and available in
wide distribution
and all. In lead-up to, like, their next proper
album, the inimitable Kranky is reissuing some of these obscurist
for-friends-and-family missives and making them widely available. For
those who haven't assiduously sought out the audio ephemera emanating
from Charalambides HQ in this five-year period, it almost serves as
seeing what they've been up to. The first of these re-releases, Unknown
Spin, is a pretty good place to start. Initially issued as an untitled
CDR split with Scorces — the wailing/whaling breath-and-drone duo
Christina splits with Heather Leigh Murray — on the eve of a 2002 tour,
the set finds the Carters and Murray, then newly integrated as third
member, quietly encircling in their idiosyncratic tones. Calling them a
drone/folk outing at the top is only the tip of the descriptive iceberg
when it comes to fumbling for the words to convey their craft into syntax;
the combo's completely harmonic music works with what seem to be
stylistic incongruities. With Tom's stately guitar playing conjuring up
dangling notes that seem drawn from the desert and suspended in the sky,
Christina's glistening guitar effects and sotto-voce voice drift
underneath like some quiet fog rolling across these red-dirt plains,
with, then, her sobbing wordless wails easily associable with the wails
of ghosts. To this, Murray brings her trademark deconstructed
pedal steel, drawing the most minimal drones from such a Golden
Country instrument. Still, laying out their make-up like this does
little to prepare one for the evocative wonderland into which Charalambides
can draw a listener. Theirs is, in a sense, music of pure
ambience, but their ghostly minimalism also seems raggedly psychedelic
at the same time. And the overall effect seems most akin to hearing the
intuitive spirituals of some new-millennial Americana, their shifts and
tensions drawn from instincts existing in both man and the land.
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