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Space-age inspiration

New sounds from the psychedelic frontier
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By Darrell Jónsson
For The Prague Post
April 30th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Christine and Tom Carter have put their own distinctive spin on modern folk.
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Charalambides


Beseppy
When: Friday, May 2, at 8:30
Where: Chateau Rouge Underground
Tickets: 180 Kč at the door
Chateau Rouge’s cellar concert space, Chateau Underground, emerged late last year as a serious contender for downtown Prague’s most forward-looking music venue. Anyone who caught the shows featuring the American band Savage Republic or Japan’s Up-Tight, as well as local acts like Sunshine Caravan, can speak for the club’s friendly atmosphere and quality programming. This Friday’s double bill of folk-psych pioneers Charalambides and American expat violinist Bethany Lacktorin (aka Beseppy) should fit right in with the club’s ongoing penchant for tasteful musical risks.
Hailing originally from Houston, Charalambides has followed the open range of psychedelic sounds radiating from the Lone Star state, minus the frantic revelatory rampages of, say, The Butthole Surfers or 13th Floor Elevators. On the map of psychedelic legacies, Charalambides’ sound hovers closest to the epic sci-fi folk-rock that former Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver Messenger Service members experimented with in the early ’70s as Planet Earth Rock ’n’ Roll Orchestra. On the contemporary map, their music is harder to place; it has some of the elegiac qualities of This Mortal Coil, while lacking any hint of ’90s pop music ambition.
“From the beginning, Charalambides have consistently spoken variants on the languages of dreams,” is how UK’s Wire magazine described the sound in its review of the band’s 2006 CD A Vintage Burden (on the Kranky label). This dreamy vocabulary includes a mix of acoustic, electric and pedal steel guitars, seemingly inspired by the NASA base in their hometown. But with Charalambides, “space” is not “spacey.” Instead, it’s a healthy sensibility of space-age wonder matched with an equally vigorous delight in vocal melody and instrumental narrative.
“The music scene we were involved in when we lived in Houston was very much an independent and rebellious community, pretty skeptical of any sort of hype, trend or ego,” says Christine Carter, the band’s co-founder, rhythm guitarist and vocalist. “At that time, the ‘underground’ stuff didn’t exist to the extent that it does now. It really prepared us to first and foremost put across how we feel inside musically, and to stick to it despite anything else.”
Characterizations of the band as the “undisputed chieftains of the American free folk movement,” or playing “weird folk,” aren’t accurate, Carter says. “I have different divisions or categories in my mind that build my aesthetic framework. The bands or performers that I feel we have things in common with probably wouldn’t be called weird folk. And the ones that would, I don’t feel much kinship to at all.”
“The [other] thing is, folk doesn’t inspire me any more than a lot of other music,” Carter continues. “I’d say I feel more inspiration from Albert Ayler and Yoko Ono than from Jean Ritchie or Shirley Collins. The folk stuff that really gets me is more on the ‘out’ spectrum, where it’s already heavily and lustily corrupted by modern and urban forms like Fairport Convention or Steeleye Span or Tim Buckley.”
Opening for Charlambides will be an American-born artist with similar individualistic resolve. Beseppy’s performances and installations using extended violin techniques and electronics have managed to defy Prague critics for the past two years, while building her respect in the local artistic community. In her home state of Minnesota, Beseppy’s performance collaborations with St. Paul’s American Composers Forum, the James Sewell Ballet and Naked Stages proved her live musical and electronic skills. Now based in Prague, she is finding appreciative audiences from Warsaw’s Fab Gallery to Prague’s Roxy NoD experimental art space.
At Chateau Rouge, Beseppy’s cinematic-scale sound collages, combined with Charalambides’ space-age folk, will offer no shortage of dynamics. Despite the contrast between their instrumentation and influences, both acts share a vital performance concept. As Carter describes it, “Live sound should be representative of real people in real time, not the reproduction of a studio sound. The experience of listening to a recording already exists frozen in time. People should expect to have an ‘only occurring once’ experience.”

Darrell Jónsson can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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