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Tom Carter & Robert Horton, "Monsters of Felt"
Tom Carter has been one of my favorite guitar players for several years now. Outside of the particular skeletal trance-blues style that he has perfected in work with Charalambides, Carter's many many solo and duo recordings carve out a truly unique improvised guitar method, blending extended technique, purist drone logic, trance minimalism, and a beautifully impure psy-punk energy befitting collaboration with many of today's lo-fi drone or psychedelic noise currents. Lately, Carter's most fruitful collaborator in the latter realm has been Robert Horton, an old-school SF-scene improviser and experimenter who has gained more of a rep in recent years due to increased productivities from his home studio, something of a lab with its collection of homemade instruments and sound-grabbing technologies. Extensive overdubbing or studio sound collage is not something Carter has explored too much on his own, and I often feel that the fully hands-on approach that he has been emphasizing on solo recordings lately (very little delay or signal damage) is essential to a lot of the delicate power and immediacy of his best works (Sun Swallower, Whispers Towards Infinity).
For this reason, I have tended to de-emphasize the Horton discs when dealing in prolific Carter strata, favoring the solo discs' thready, purer bolts into the void over the more murky, turbulent coilings of Horton's more collage-oriented sound . That said, I'm hearing a lot more open, or at least patiently blissed-out spaces on this new one: lanquid, eastern wanderings, chimed with gamelan percussion and sanded fine with stacked ebow magic. Carter's guitar gets a lot of the volume; his playing is truly "interrogating," figures and overtones not so much teased as built out, hammered or gracefully strangled from the instrument. The quiet hardware of the roomsound, metal and string and electric waves can be heard, brought into range by Horton's tape master, tightly blanketed and buzzing with the insectoid flutter of sampled sound.
Monsters of Felt maintains a quiet roar of ascent and submission throughout, never too scattered or too obsessed with its details, but altogether honoring an aesthetic of environmental sound collision and joyful exploration. It leaves me excited for more from Preservation Music (whose Motion compilation of Australian sound art I still spin often) and anticipating more Horton/Carter collabs, like the new one on Three Lobed under the name Turnstone.
samples:
(coming soon)
