Charalambides
Internal Eternal
Wholly Other

Just in time for the Christmas season, and a gift that has remained hidden under the evergreen tree of Charalambides' music for nearly five years now, comes this duo release, coated in the disintegrating vision of Houston dissolving in the steel greys of night.

The architecture of this CD is both Byzantine and tantric. Husband and wife Tom and Christina played this particular set one Christmas Eve on two guitars, and they both give and receive glimmering black tones and melancholic tinsel on their fleshed branches. Each second rustles open yet another package of the ever-opening present, with intuitive string trances, as their fingers caress, pick, retrace, and re-entwine like strings and bows of gongs. The eight pieces flow together; the silences and silent night hums become inseparable in the instrumental interplay of the Carters. Solemn stair scales ascend through the black-age parapets of Houston, towards the smog stars, while the peels and shrieks of pedal vertigo plunge and swirl down the chambers. Turning into part of the stone bottom now, of coil and return, the disparate back towards union. Still the strings hum, merge and chase the echoes, yet all reverts back into the solemnity of the strings, and like the snow-fall, the earth at the bottom waits to sing again.

Copyright © 1999 Andy Beta