AN AVANT GARDE WINDOW
Musician Tom Carter bounces back with experimental psych rock after near death
Tom Carter’s eyes dart about behind smoky, plastic-framed glasses.
He takes in the black-and-white handbills on the walls at Sound Exchange that tout shows by bands that don’t exist anymore at venues that don’t exist anymore.
Carter exudes no sentimentality or nostalgia. His face — often with minimal expression — is framed by a neatly trim med beard, which is going gray. His voice, too, is understated and hushed, whether he’s talking about a music scene from days past, his band or a health crisis a few years ago that should have killed him while he was on tour in Europe.
“People tell me my playing has changed since then,” the guitarist says of a 2012 hospitalization for septic shock. “I really couldn’t hear it. But maybe there’s something different in my approach. I don’t feel like there’s anything noticeably different in what I’m doing.”
Despite his measured demeanor, Carter gets a warm welcome at Sound Exchange, the Montrose record store where he worked long ago. It’s where a customer with the surname Charalambides gave him and his then wife, Christina, a name for their band. Third members would come and go from Charalambides, but the two-Carter core has now been together a quarter century, creating a dark, meditative and improvisational version of psychedelic music.
In doing so, Charalambides endured divorce, dislocation and near death. For the first time in nearly a decade, the band will play Friday in Houston, where its dark and experimental sound took shape.
The city sound
Carter arrived here in the mid’80s to attend the University of Houston.
He grew up in Ohio in a religious household, “not in the holy roller sense but where the church was the center of my mom’s social life.”
There was a piano in the house, and Carter studied music while playing the saxophone in band class.
“I got here and hated it,” he says. But he met a girl and found himself in a band, Mike Gunn, a much loved psychedelic rock act that formed here in the late ’80s.
Carter was still playing in Mike Gunn when he started a very different project with Christina, which allowed him to pursue stranger sounds that the band wouldn’t accommodate.
The group’s first recording, “Our Bed Is Green,” was a defense mechanism of sorts. The Carters didn’t feel like they were ready to play live, but a friend at KTRU wanted to get them on his show.
“We just gave him a cassette instead,” Carter says, “this simple and gestural thing.”
Charalambides was formalized with that recording.
They’d work in a trio format more often than not early on, playing music that could be droning and somber with sharp punctuations of feedback. “Now I can see how we mapped out a sound,” Carter says. “But the idea was to leave room for something new.”
The use of acoustic guitars drew descriptions of their music as outsider folk, but the Carters never thought “folk” fit. Their music wasn’t the sound of rural America: It was modern and unnerving at times.
“It sounded like Houston to us, in the sense that we really wanted it to sound urban. People still review our albums and talk about the desert and vast open spaces. I’m not sure they’re hearing what I hear. We thought we were making music that sounded like freeways and concrete.”
Furthering that aesthetic, covers for Charalambides albums were often stark in black and white. The cover for 1998’s “Houston” was a snippet of skyline, but not the gleaming iconic skyline. “When I think of the skyline, I don’t think of the Shell building,” Carter says. “I don’t think of the steel and glass monsters. I think of the backside of downtown, or maybe Brays Bayou over by the jail.”
After making albums that distinctly represented their hometown — with titles such as “Market Square” and “Houston” — the Carters eventually moved to Austin. They later divorced, and Carter moved to the Bay Area in California and later to Queens in New York, where he still lives.
There they made “Exile” in 2011, an album that had a bit more polish than its predecessors — nothing so formal as a breakout — theirs was
still decidedly complicated and difficult music — but still a distinctive recording in which Christina’s lyrics and voice pushed more to the fore.
They took the album to Europe, and then things got complicated.
An unfortunate event
Charalambides story nearly ended in Germany.
Carter had been feeling unwell during that 2012 tour, and he knew it was something more than influenza or tour flu.
“It seemed unusual; my body felt weaker than it ever had before,” he says.
Carter decided to seek medical treatment, but an acquaintance in Germany suggested he skip the big hospital in Berlin and instead
go to a smaller military hospital where he’d be treated more quickly. That decision may have saved Carter’s life.
“They’d never have gotten to me as fast at the bigger hospital because it was supposed to be a mess,” he says. “And about the time I got there, that’s when the sepsis exploded.”
Carter was placed in a medically induced coma when his body temperature sailed past 104 degrees.
“People ask how bad it was,” he says. “I really don’t remember any of it after going to the hospital. When I woke up, that’s when it got really weird. I had a hard time distinguishing between what was a dream and what was reality.”
He spent nearly 40 days in ICU and then had another three weeks of therapy so he could build up the strength to get home. Carter recovered, though arterial fibrillation is the kind of health crisis that leaves a lasting mark. His heart, he says, won’t ever operate as efficiently as it did before.
But he was never a screamer or one prone to fits about the stage with his instrument. Instead, Carter always preferred to play seated. Now all he needs is a chair, his guitar and a few effects pedals.
If the incident will affect future recordings of Charalambides, he’s not likely to admit it.
“I have this immense gratitude for some people who helped, with both work and money,” he says. “Beyond that, there’s not a whole lot I took from the experience. I guess a sense of mortality.”