Charalambides - From the Chamber to the Cosmos

Charalambides is the stable (and itinerant) project made up of the married couple Tom and Christina Carter, based in Texas (first Houston, then Austin). Their music is intimately free. Free are their reference points and sources of inspiration (from German kraut and kosmische to the Velvet Underground, from the classic psych of Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead and It's A Beautiful Day, to Peter Green and Texan avant-rock, from the chaos artist Mayo Thompson to Roky Erickson's proto-wave guitar, to the late-80s ambient revival), free are the compositions (individual pieces range from song form to unfinished fragment, from sketch to long lysergic parade, up to the most colossal suite form), free is the line-up (from the duo to parallel and non-parallel collaborations, and the inevitable absorption of a third element, depending on need). Free is, finally and above all, their technique.

The art of Charalambides is also subliminal. Almost always the traditional association of melody, harmony and rhythm is absent, or heavily distorted: their music seems increasingly interested in a kind of union-communion between cosmos and nature. On one hand there are explorations of the unknown, stellar forays, the unstable and perpetual transformations of galaxies as the highest manifestation of universal life; on the other there is the recording of the perpetual course and recurrence of biological events, of the four fundamental elements, of the intersections between the cardinal points. Tom and Christina Carter are custodians of a bipolar world whose coordinates are continually retraced and, at the same time, continually built, in compositions that rise from chamber style to the most far-reaching of cosmic styles.

In a sense, what Charalambides make is, more than psychedelia or avant-garde, art-rock in its primitive (and otherworldly) state. What's certain is that, as in the sublime examples of My Bloody Valentine (and shoegazers more generally) or the aforementioned Californian trance scene (Savage Republic above all), Charalambides don't imitate the effect of the great historic psychedelic bands, but go straight back to the source, exploring access tunnels that had remained hidden in shadow. What's astonishing, though, is that such profoundly heterogeneous poetic output comes from hyper-frugal instrumentation, even leaner than the usual chamber-music setup: two guitars (sometimes just one) and voice. Alongside the duo there occasionally appears the wildcard element of a third member (pedal steel, slide, electronics etc.), another major instance of shaping the sound according to painterly-naturalistic criteria. The band's mastery makes the White Stripes look like cunning rock apprentices.

Christina is tasked with cementing (or deconstructing) pseudo-harmonic, anti-rhythmic textural foundations, which often draw on raga, or on faded scraps of folk songs from other eras, or embryos of mysterious, cathartic pieces, freely repeated. In a word, everything that - in a traditional band - would go under the name of "rhythm guitar". Tom's guitar, for his part, is simply a monster of acid-lysergic improvisations, cosmic-sidereal invectives, noise excursions, psychotic splittings, free-jazz cacophonies. Closing the circle is once again Christina, this time with her voice. Here too the technique is free, childlike, modulated and naive: Christina draws on experimental vocal techniques honed over the decades, across a broad and damned creative spectrum (from the deconstructions of Jeanne Lee, to the blends of Patty Waters, from Robin Holcomb to the dematerializations of Liz Fraser, from the melodic instinct of Madonna to the stunning screams of Diamanda Galas).

A splendid complement to their fascinating stylistic range comes from the roots of Eastern tradition, above all the Tibetan mantra and the Indian raga. Here too, the band's take is disorienting, as playful as it is austere, as frayed and amateurish as it is magical and perverse. In many of Charalambides' masterpiece pieces ("Here Not Here", "Black Bed Blues", "House Of Three Sides", "Naked In Our Deathskins", "Our Bed Is Green", "Unknown Spin", "Think About") modal music resounds like a warning, or like a harmonic beacon that produces instability (not balance) and projects the two soloists' stunned sonic digressions.

Their major works are heterogeneous, self-contained sonic journeys that find few precedents in the history of psychedelic rock, and which, if anything, bring them closer to contemporary classical music: Our Bed Is Green, a sort of Chinese-box contraption that works through multiplications of electro-acoustic music, drone rock and stripped-down folk (also their most unusual output), Market Square, an immense monolith that encompasses decades of timbral transfigurations, a double album charged with emotional-naturalistic tension, the watershed work that establishes them among the peaks of alternative rock, and Joy Shapes, a vast dissertation of ascetic sounds, organized as an avant-garde mass of capillary timbres, whose miracle of achieving grandiose results from humble chamber instrumentation makes it worthy of standing alongside Third Ear Band's Elements, or Popol Vuh's "Hosianna Mantra".

Their story begins in Houston, Texas, with the merger of what remained of an obscure avant-garde outfit, arbitrarily nicknamed Mutual Admiration Society, and the guitarist of Mike Gunn, a young Tom Carter. Alongside the duo appears Kyle Silfer, on electronic devices.

Their recording saga thus begins with the sprawling Our Bed Is Green (self-released, 1992; reissued by Kranky, 2004), on a maxi-cassette, one of the most original and fascinating records of the era, one of the masterpieces of dissociated rock. It is, at once, their first summa, the record that catalyzes the tendencies in the air and their earliest intentions, ending up sounding like a free-form application manual of the dictates of historical avant-garde (musique concrète, electro-acoustics, drone music, etc.). It opens straight away with "Tea", a mantric lo-fi piece, complete with an oscillating suspension acting as a supernatural counterpoint. "The Threadmill" is multi-layered flickering noise, with a deep feedback weaving back and forth with the primordial chaos (a meta-metaphor for the band itself, the image of the origin of the creative act).

In the same way, "The Core" and, further on, "Regret", are condensed pyramidal constructions, in which mystical reverb, single-chord arpeggios and ecstatic singing fall prey to Tom's guitar overtones, overpowering everything else. "Black Pope" carries on the experiments along immobilized, bluesy lines, frozen into estranged riffs that overlap and keep producing new acoustic phase-shifts, arriving at a concert of physiological deformations of traditional material.

"Stuttgart" starts back from the mercurial Velvet Underground of "White Light/White Heat", heightening its background spoken chatter and electronic distortions to the brink of pure cacophony, while still holding on to a flying-carpet pattern of pure arpeggios.

"Take The Pointing Finger For The Moon" lowers the stakes again towards a rhythmic folk ballad, with the second guitar strumming dissonantly and Christina's distant, phantasmagoric, blurred and doubled vocalizations. The project's intransigence erupts explosively in tracks like "Faze Her" (the natural consequence of "Regret"), where Christina's arpeggio and Tom's acidic solfège merge into indefinite drapes of booming feedback, almost a jam of apocalyptic fanfares, unfolding in an ever more catastrophic direction, or in "Cosmic String", with distorted organ filtered through Bach-like phrasing and a screaming guitar decorating the harmony, or again in "The Battle", an almost gothic epic of booming guitars over Christina's whispers. The closing gem ("Finale") echoes Lisa Germano, two years before her personal breakthrough: radio broadcast activity, hazy guitar scales, their free-form variations, and a sharply shrill vocal nursery rhyme.

"Same Old Routine" is one of the band's defining tracks, a template that will be explored at length both in their mature works and in individual solo episodes (not to mention their imitators). It kicks off with martial guitar tones, almost like the solemn Jefferson Airplane of "After Bathing At Baxter's", but it all turns into a drawn-out, relaxed chant thanks to Tom's electrification, cast as an irrational Virgil. The same goes for the title track, a cathartic weave of guitar and Tom's darkened work on the lower strings, a sort of extremely subtle, barely sketched rhythmic sprint. "20 Hours", a dazed acoustic lo-fi song, sung with the nihilistic attitude of a riot-grrrl band and sinuous in its repeated accompaniment, is — by contrast — an anomaly unlikely to find new creative outlets.

The whole album is perhaps one big anomaly, ill-suited to the grand developments of the band's mature phase. Each of these (small, medium, medium-long) fragments seems like a shard — seen, in turn, from the most diverse angles of light — that makes up a mysterious fresco transcending the use of tonality in rock music. This vast series of micrometric fragments has also achieved a remarkable awareness in uniting wildly different yet homogeneous and magnificently cohesive expressive references, as impoverished as the most forgotten turn-of-the-century field recording, and as blazing as the largest, most overwhelming of comets. Animal Collective, Black Dice, and more generally the entire pre-war folk scene and the weird-folk revival will take their running start from this record.

The following releases split in two the aesthetic question set up by the intense creative concentration of Our Bed Is Green: the dimension of sonic research (Union), and the post-folk dimension (Historic 6th Ward).

In Union (Siltbreeze, 1994) the evoked spaces begin to open up until they scatter into entropy. In "Florian", for example, an accordion intoning a suspended magic formula converges with distorted (yet relaxed and sunny) guitars that could easily fit into the slow tracks of R.E.M.'s "Monster", but angelic warbling from an unspecified (alien?) source contradicts everything. From here the process of disintegration begins: Tom's imitative polyphony emerges, while everything around it morphs into minimal drone; two fading transitions finally produce the effect of a Baroque sarabande of near-Pergolesi ecclesiastical glory.

In "Fucking Creek" there is a far-off lament coupled with kosmische vibrations and glimpses à la Edgar Froese, which suddenly morphs into a dissonant rural canon with an Irish-mood accordion and a guitar intoning its own "Aum", while in "Another Way Out" there are two laments (an almost muezzin-like call and a quietly booming raga melisma from Tom), splitting, crossing and moving in lockstep towards harmonic indeterminacy. "Torn Between" opens with a cajun field recording worthy of Alan Lomax, followed by a slow, calm strumming and a solitary vocal hymn from Christina, rounded off by a general thickening with mournful sax.

The album heads into transcendental territory at its most extreme moments, as in "Dominize", a collage of voices (confused chatter, a disconnected monologue, a polyphonic chorus) and their respective (yet incoherent) manipulation, pierced by a tiny piccolo solo and a crescendo tribal march. "I've Been There Again" is a deceitful folk song, starting off almost like any ordinary traditional tune but concealing its blank-page alter-ego for the surrounding improvisations, from honky-tonk piano to flighty accordion, within a general celestial ionosphere, rarefied and unstable.

More conventional results come with Historic 6th Ward (Siltbreeze, 1994; reissued in expanded edition on Time Lag, 1996), with Jason Bill as the third member, whose main intent seems to be steering the matter towards the debasement of apocalyptic folk. Drab songs prevail, like "High In My Head", and the even more watered-down "Cheap", with lowered tones in favor of a subdued piece; likewise "Splitting", a talking-blues folk number with Tom's guitar laminated in metallic drone, again leaning towards a glassy, muted mood.

Rising above are "Hail To The Brightness", an esoteric concert for dissonant woodwinds (fading into a sampled snippet of radio broadcast), "Samar", a sort of remix of Fahey-esque American primitive (via distortion's measured tolling, like pulsations), and "Magnus", a solemn keyboard drone that hosts Christina's floating vocals (almost a sci-fi version of Our Bed Is Green). "Of March" kicks off in the most typically Orientalist psych manner à la David Crosby (sitar effect, reverse effect), before turning into a shapeless sarabande that finally disintegrates, evaporates, slowing down to an imperceptible murmur. The Charalambides' artistry is put to the service of the wretched tex-mex of "Gypsy Woman", their lowest point.

Market Square (Siltbreeze, 1995) is the second, grandiose summa of Charalambides, a bridge between the past, present and future of avant-garde rock (and, first and foremost, of the band itself). Here Charalambides establish themselves as discoverers of trembling galaxies and terrible cosmoses gushing with dense photonic trails, going as far as improvising themselves as conductors of the eternal life-death ballet (the ultimate limit of their music). Everything is calculated to render an almost illusory, persuasively suggestive effect, which once again unfurls from the humblest incipits and opens up chasms of sidereal eternity.

The monolith (on double Lp) opens with the sprawling digression of "Think About", one of their absolute masterpieces. This time there's even a sample of a phone call setting off the (enormously extended) dialogue between the two guitars, and Christina's powerful whisper, a sort of aching, fantastical singing that — together — produces a dramatic rise in dynamics. Shortly after, an interpenetration of magnetic waves arrives, leading to a distorted wave, and the reappearance of the trailing vocal; the final coda of murmurs preludes a new, tremendous surge of distorted chaos, almost like a humanitarian warning. "Those Who Walk" is a decompressing song that, midway through, opens onto an encounter of mysterious apparitions: filtered voice, lava flows and distorted backdrops, over a generally rippling timbre.

“We Live Like Pigs”, a slow and solemn kraut kaleidoscope, is the prelude to the suite “Namasté”, another of the album's peaks. Starting from a calm two-way exchange, an ecstatic raga, the band frames a recitative for soprano Christina in which the guitar bristles and the cymbals rear up diabolically; in the second part (“Lightning Whelk”), introduced by radiations, waves and piano notes, everything disintegrates into a black hole of atonal reverbs, electronic distortions, devastating walls of sound; the third (“Hours”) is an anguished psalm pierced by distorted guitars; the fourth (“And So Danced The River”) ventures into a stalagmite-like crystal chamber of chimes and keyboard reverberations, where the tinkling of Tom's guitar ends up rising like a majestic tide.

The second record opens with Charalambides' emblematic track, “House Of Three Sides”. In this masterpiece, the opposing forces are clear from the very start: on one side, Christina's haughty phrasing, intoned like a magic formula; on the other, Tom's agonized glissando. In between, Christina's singing, never so shamanic. The two guitars then hurl themselves against each other, like a to-the-death battle of supernatural forces; as soon as the singing starts to crumble, the guitars band together, interpenetrating one another to heighten the mystical force of the ascent. A brief moment of calm arrives, but the return of the first part is even more chaotic and deformed, searing and violent.

In “Saratoga Reel” the pairing of a droning bass note and Christina's bare guitar arrives at a restless, agitated transcendent metamorphosis, giving way to a John Cage-style radio-works piece that grows ever more invasive until it becomes pure radiation. “Indianola” is a magma of epic guitars crackling dis-harmonically, almost the musical equivalent of the Pillars of Hercules, devastated by a terrifying crescendo that swallows the entire acoustic space whole. “Magnolia At Last”, bare and impoverished folk, is shaped by Tom's ascending and descending scales, with the vocal line becoming a precarious invocation. “Some Day You'll Get Yours” closes everything out, a mysterious, almost timid guitar drone, oscillating and floating (almost a harmonic contortion), buoyed by Christina's singing, the non plus ultra of phantasmagoria.

Market Square launches the band into orbit, in every sense — including on the record-label front. Charalambides fully come into their own as far as their expressive means are concerned: first they found their own indie label, Wholly Other, to house self-produced CD-Rs (almost always amateur bootlegs or outtakes from the main body of work, with the exception of Glowing Raw), then they launch solo careers. Tom will distinguish himself with Monument (Wholly Other, 2001), before devoting himself mostly to sporadic (and not-so-sporadic) collaborations, and to a substantial discographic incontinence. The same goes for Christina, at times more radical than her husband (as in her two parallel projects Scorces and Bastard Wing), but also with works that at times recall the mother band's finest results (Electrice; Kranky, 2006).

This multidirectional activity of the band has also led to some highly praiseworthy achievements in electro-acoustic avant-garde territory: above all, their appearance on the prestigious compilation Harmony Of The Spheres (Drunken Fish, 1996) alongside Loren Connors, Bardo Pond and Jessamine, with the (closing) track “Naked In Our Deathskins”, a crystal-clear astral meditation in the form of ambient-guitar.

Houston and Unknow Spin are once again transitional works, both devoted to sound-sculpting, and to the sonic possibilities of the three-piece line-up (Jason Bill will gradually be replaced by Heather Leigh Murray, coming from circles of classical music).

Houston (Siltbreeze, 1999) is a conceptual album bordering on cold theorizing, but one that still manages to beguile with its continuous, almost hypnotic reworkings of distorted, multi-layered sound. “Voice Within” already looks to the future, a piece wholly oriented towards free-form for acoustic guitar and voice (with a crystalline, Mitchell-esque high register), while “The Blow Deer” is a cantata for multiplied voice, an aberrant hallucination bridging the Meredith Monk of “Turtle Dreams” and the Tim Buckley of “Starsailor”, and “Lexington” is a free martial fantasia for solo piano.

Then “Dancing”, another disjointed cantata (over which spectral wordless vocalizations pile up), this time accompanied by strumming and near-flamenco arpeggios, and “Midnight Chants”, a continuum as unsettling as a black hole advancing over an unsuspecting folk strumming, overwhelmed by electro-dissonant overtones and a new alien drone, are the extreme poles of the band's renewed sonic palette.

Closing things out is a triad that borders on the prodigious, yet still doesn't quite dare to fully explore the ultimate consequences of its expressive charge. “Denver Arbor” scatters chordal guitar lashes in a frugal spirit of self-flagellation (see Leo Kottke) and settles into a formulaic mood worthy of the great rural works, a small gem of modern folk philology. “Two Places At Once” is an entranced wordless lullaby for arpeggios and musique concrète of crickets. “Songs For Always” is a slowed-down pow-wow built on a dirge of guitar and voice, sunk under the mournful wail of two saxophones.

Unknown Spin (Kranky, 2003) magnificently prepares the ground for the great album that follows, but it lacks cohesion and ambition. The band's bold style shines through only on the vast title track, once again an admirable example of dynamic contrast (continually regenerated) between timbres, pitches and harmonic dissections, while the remaining tracks offer only a pale outline of inconclusive sketches.

Joy Shapes (Kranky, 2004) finally cements their place as one of the most courageous and daring bands of recent years, with a long, complex album, difficult to assimilate, an arcane mass devoted to the forces of the cosmos and to ecstatic parastasis. “Here Not Here” is a vast cosmic hallucination, entirely germinated from the dark opening three-note motif unfolding in slow but inexorable succession. Even the simple yet grinding lyric is built on arcane oppositions of dematerialization and of a transfigured, apocalyptic observation of natural motion. It's all travail, grandiose contradiction, as linear and static as it is shifting and dynamic. But soon Christina's goosebump-inducing cries give way to a meditative insight that obstinately repeats the opening cell, layering it over forests of hisses, extremely high-pitched vocalizations and stunning harmonic resonances. Charalambides' music settles effectively within the coordinates traced by Popol Vuh, ambient-psych avant-garde and serialism, going on to describe the vertigo of panic terror. “Stroke” is built on a new (non-)rhythmic pulse, an ascetic raga and a metaphor for the passage of time, as cosmic energy in continuous dissipation, an exhausting accumulation of cosmic light (the almost Byzantine tremolos submerging the initial pulse) and astro-sidereal dissonances.

An awestruck arpeggio for string instruments is instead the hallmark of the title track, laden with the typical distortions of acid-rock, but used as the vocabulary of a grammar of immense spaces, powerful sonic means that continually break through the ultrasonic barrier with slow catharsis. The vocal is sinusoidal, perfectly suspended between ascending and descending harmonic scales, once again defining a solemn, cognitive symmetry. The orchestration becomes a means of agonizing exploration of the cosmos's absolute forces, an aberrant wall of ventricles made of barely-sketched phrases, layered and creeping vibratos and tremolos, sudden low accents, terrifying warnings. Carter proves to be the Liz Fraser of the afterlife, catapulted into narrating wondrous visions perennially pitched in the registers of high and extra-high soprano, complete with cacophonous swerves and desperate modulations that often veer into a strangled scream.

“Natural Night” opens with an atonal, crystalline tinkling, immediately declaring its status as a hallucinatory atmospheric stasis. The tremors of the guitars form the foundation for Christina's astonished hisses, which in turn trigger an impressive chorus of illusionistic sounds in mutual metamorphosis (the instrumental wanderings of a Bela Bartok). When everything settles, all that remains is a swamp of metallic sounds and horrifying slashes, distant vocal vibrations and spectral chords in restless shudder.

“Voice For You” is a new concert of shocking chordal resonances. Once again there's the illusionism (one of the work's central themes) in the deformed sounds of the opening, which merge into vocal forays steeped in sound effect, while the guitar weaves interminable chordal litanies, the outline becoming an apotheosis of indefiniteness. The noise crescendo of the finale shows what lies at the end of the long cosmic road glimpsed fleetingly in the closing of the title track of “Lorca”, where the tramp Tim Buckley was preparing to set out: a monumental altar of alien sacrifices, described at length and in depth by the indecipherable sonic mass that closes the record.

An impressive record, where everything (from the broad, quasi-symphonic breadth, to the structure built on long free-form suites, to the ultra-cosmic folk tones) serves a hallucinated, dreamlike treatise that is both traversed by and — at the same time — generated by a prodigious sonic flow. There are no proper compositions here, only three performers striking up a “face-to-face” conversation of pure, ascetic sounds. It admits no answers or agreement (or disagreement), only admiration and near-reverent devotion.

A Vintage Burden (Kranky, 2007), arriving two years after the miracle of Joy Shapes, stands as its acoustic counterpart, steeped in the same spirit of exploration of transcendent sonic spaces. A Vintage Burden, in fact, has only two shortcomings: the missing third member (Heather Leugh Murray on Joy Shapes and Unknown Spin, Jason Bill on Historic 6th Ward, and Kyle Silfer on Our Bed Is Green) and the sheer grandiosity of the previous record. But if there are any downsides to the project, that's about where they end.

The 17 instrumental minutes of "Black Bed Blues" make history all on their own. It opens with the minor-key, formulaic tone of Christina's rhythm guitar – vaguely desert blues à la Castanets – serving as a harmonic backdrop to Tom's shifting, quietly lysergic improvisations. The piece ranges from understated arabesques to volatile counterpoints, to whispered tonal tears, from overlapping steel-guitar phantasmagoria to deceptive glissandos, all the way to a free guitar phrase that is pure spatial elevation. In short, "Black Bed Blues" is the chamber-music equivalent of the suites on Joy Shapes. This gallery of utterly heterogeneous guitar "tropes", of severe, austerely electrified chordal tones, projects a kind of new-classic status, acting as a bridge between the Grateful Dead (both "Live/Dead" and "Workingman's Dead") and the Bardo Pond of the colossal "Amen", a pained dialogue between psychedelia and acid-rock.

On the other five tracks, Christina's singing (again kept at a safe distance from the bloodbath of Joy Shapes) reveals a new technique. On "Two Birds" it's almost a vital breath that gives body to the guitars, leading them into a chordal procession that stacks atmospheric layer upon atmospheric layer. On "There Is No End", which breathes the same arcane ionosphere typical of their sound, that same voice instead takes on almost mystical-alchemical timbres, able to shift the registers of cosmic music from a stretched, suspended lullaby to a static trance, all the way to the manner of an acoustic raga. "Dormant Love" builds a celestial flow out of joyful chords and an almost serene vocal, with sharp ambient touches of steel guitar, while "Spring" offers a refrain countered by a splendid arpeggio somewhere between playful and questioning, with a vocal almost like an otherworldly Joan Baez and instrumental duets brought to emotional prominence, finally thickened in the psych coda.

Even allowing for matters of taste that might balance one's enjoyment of it, the album is mercurial (where Joy Shapes was unsettling), crystalline (where Joy Shapes was apocalyptic), acoustic, measured, kaleidoscopic, all at once. The instrumental feeling and interplay remain top-notch, almost outdoing themselves, while Christina the vocalist takes giant steps forward. Their coming to terms with chamber folk-blues – far more convincingly than on Historic Sixth Ward – reveals a composite picture of the duo's real creative possibilities, a small goldmine of expressiveness built on mature compositions.

A Vintage Burden is the record with which Tom and Christina Carter definitively spell out their austere stylistic intentions, rooted in a kind of transfiguring chamber psychedelia.

Likeness (Kranky, 2007), arriving a little over a year later, is the natural flipside of the matter. In this short span of time, all sorts of things happen within the Charalambides camp: rumors of separation between the Carters, solo and/or parallel projects and counter-projects, a cascade of CD-Rs released on their own indie label Wholly Other, and an Italian tour (notably the Castelfranco show in late May 2007, ed.).

It's only logical and fully understandable that, after so many thrilling records (especially given their splendid career), a settling-down would follow. On Likeness they turn to traditional folk and catch their breath. So we get "The Good Life", "Uncloudy Day" (with Christina playing piano like a tubular bell), "Walking Through The Graveyard" (a slowed-down passacaglia warped by amp effects, recalling Our Bed Is Green), "Figs And Oranges" (with broad psych swirls of reversed guitar).

The exception is the extended "Memory Takes Hold", which takes five minutes of frozen breaths and insistent whispers before Christina intones her mantric dirge, with Tom following along with his galactic arabesques. The vocal formula of "What You Do For Money" is also captivating, briefly recalling the cosmic-mass reverberations of Joy Shapes: it opens with a low-frequency glissando figure, then distortion takes over until it builds into a cosmic solo and a horror-movie atmosphere of distorted chords. "Saddle Up The Pony" is a little solo showcase for Tom, split between dark overtones and reverberating pulses, and "Feather In The Air" (with drums) is a rarefied, Can-like collage built on shapeshifting guitar washes.

Despite the sturdiness of a high-class stylistic exercise, the compositions often run cold, making the whole thing feel like a rather solemn exercise in self-imitation, or a pale copy of A Vintage Burden. It remains didactic in its indulgence, and all too familiar in its barely sketched-out take on the band's favored genre.

Ultimately, Charalambides are one of the most significant projects within the rural psychedelia that caused such a stir in the '90s. Compared to the other geniuses of '90s sonic exploration (Flying Saucer Attack, the Gibbons brothers and Roy Montgomery, Dead C), the Houston band managed to skillfully fuse the many currents of the zeitgeist, of which they became unwitting heirs.

The Charalambides of "House Of Three Sides" and "Joy Shapes" make universal music for which the label "post-" fits far too snugly. In its grandiloquent, quasi-scientific and quasi-psychological attempt to unify the forces of the cosmos and, through them, to play out the supreme game of panta rei, this music is simply beyond any finished definition. Even if its influence isn't so direct or explicit, perhaps only the American primitivism of Basho and Fahey managed to produce artistic and descriptive emanations this moving.

After a lesser Exile (2011), the couple enters a stage of creative crisis, both as a duo and in their respective solo projects, a crisis that coincides with the definitive collapse of the entire freak-folk movement, not unlike the implosion of Greenwich Village in its heyday. They only make up for it with a handful of reissues of hard-to-find CD-Rs and collections of outtakes: Electricity Ghost (2007), Three-Lane Blacktop (2010), Glowing Raw (2016), Strangle The Wretched Heavens (2016).

The comeback album, Charalambides: Tom And Christina Carter (2018), sounds as generic as its title, listless and hesitant. Only from the bewitched opening of "Proper" and its developments do the two achieve a certain alchemy, an unusual form of Brian Eno's "Discreet Music" made of feedback filaments and detached vocal tones, before diving into much more standard psychedelic glissandos. "Runaway" also has a tremulous, crepuscular opening of vibrations and refractions (guitar, harmonica and warbles), but for almost twenty minutes what dominates is just a flat, funereal drone going nowhere. Things get worse on the shorter tracks, which are strummed and at times amateurish: thankfully, in the last two minutes of "Life And Death" Tom's guitar rises into a demonic crescendo and Christina stops wailing. To their longstanding poverty of means, the two now add a congenital poverty of ideas. Over these years Christina seems to have been struck by Patti Smith's vocal style, and her usual dark spirituality comes out crumpled as a result. The truly astonishing thing about the record is just how little emerges from tracks of such considerable length.

Out Of Place (2018), cassetta in edizione limitata, raccoglie altre lunghe meditazioni.

The new solo projects – Tom's extensive solo-guitar improvisations collected on Long Time On The Road (2020), and Christina's mile-long solo-voice outing Offer (2021) – converge in the 38 minutes of What Is To Come (2022), a "hyper-raga" for voice and guitar that restores a fair share of their mystical-psychedelic fervor. The opening is a version both ethereal and tormented of La Monte Young's "Dream House", a spirit of superhuman trance built from marimba-like resonances and Indian-flute-like vocal cries, which gradually dematerializes before flaring back up in a Fahey-like sortie until it catches fire with acid-rock distortion. A wordless, bucolic digression counterbalances it. When the voice returns, it appears suddenly like a kind of post-Joni Mitchell aerophone against a rarefied, glacial backdrop that slowly turns into a metaphysical invocation in the style of Jerry Garcia and Peter Green, right up to the final exhalation. The balance and alchemy between the two aren't flawless: Tom is clearly the supreme architect of the operation, a masterful, experienced guitarist, a talented sound-painter and an excellent scholar of psychedelic music history, while Christina, even when she manages to add some tasteful touches of tragedy, shows little skill or versatility when left to her own devices. All told, it's still their best project since the distant days of A Vintage Burden.

The same sessions yield four more shorter, wordless psychedelic songs ("Begins To Beam", "Appears", "Comes My Way" and "Looks At Me And Smiles"), later collected on From For Two (2022). Almost in reverse of its predecessor, here it's Christina who takes center stage, while Tom limits himself to discreetly blowing in his guitar breezes behind her.

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