Charalambides
Charalambides founders Tom and Christina Carter dedicate themselves to a vision of iconoclastic music as transformative force. Touching on the outer limits of acid folk, psych rock, and improvisation, their music remains uniquely personal and consistent through apparently extreme shifts in sound and performance tactics.
The group formed in Houston, Texas in 1991 amid a flock of fearlessly exploratory rock bands, including stoner rock pioneers The Mike Gunn (which Tom co-founded in 1989). Charalambides—initially a trio—played a few shows before reverting to a duo and releasing Our Bed Is Green on cassette in 1992. Our Bed Is Green’s low-fi, avant-bedroom aesthetic attracted the attention of Philadelphia’s Siltbreeze records—famed for their injection of The Dead C, the Shadow Ring, and Harry Pussy into adventurous American skulls—who released Union and Market Square, the first two Charalambides LPs, to a wider freak-rock audience.
Charalambides went on to produce dozens of LPs, CDs, and cassettes on various other labels, including Eclipse, Time-Lag, and Kranky, sometimes as a trio—first with guitarist Jason Bill, and later with pedal steel player and vocalist Heather Leigh—before finally cementing their duo configuration in 2004.
From their 2006 Kranky release A Vintage Burdenthrough 2011’s Exile, Tom and Christina reaffirmed their dedication to song-as-mantra. Yet other recordings (like 2001's Unknown Spin) whisper of interstellar voids filled with silence, while others (like 2004's Joy Shapes) howl with fiery catharsis and gnosis. Charalambides: Tom and Christina Carter, their 2018 2xLP on Drawing Room Records, is their most current offering.
"...Musically, through two decades of working together, they've created a world apart. Though they've played with many like-minded artists and floated through a number of "scenes" ... their work feels wholly self-contained, never seeming to refer to anything but itself." - Marc Masters, Pitchfork
"Christina has a beautiful voice, clear and bell-like. I've heard her influence on lots of women in the experimental underground music scene. I never heard anyone quite as vulnerable and as strong. It's kind of magical. I never get tired of listening to it. It's fresh every time I put it on." - Kim Gordon, New York Times
On the band's last album, Likeness, Charalambides used old American folk lyrics like mirrors to both reflect the stains upon the country's soul and burn them away. The Carters are just as cognizant of these afflictions on Exile, but the struggles they recount are individual ones, and the tongues they speak in now are their own." - Bill Meyer, Dusted Magazine
"Charalambides are among the most beautiful and mysterious groups to have emerged from the American desert. ...They have created a glowing template of humanist/mystical improvisation that has kneaded brain muscles from here to Kokomo." - Byron Coley, The Wire
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