Christina Carter - Living Contact
(Kranky)
Over the years, Christina Carter has been scrupulous in documenting her growth as an artist through private recordings. Carter’s range is broad and is ever expanding so that each recording can only offer a snapshot glimpse into an aspect of her musical development at any one time. For this reason, it is very difficult to gain an appreciation or understanding of her music without hearing more than one point in the continuum. However, one has to start somewhere, and it might as well be at the “Beginning.” Living Contact is the first in a series of Kranky’s Christina Carter solo reissues and follows the philosophy of chronological release so that Carter’s transformation unfolds before our ears.
Living Contact consists of recordings originally released as a CDR on Wholly Other in 2001 but which were recorded during a four-year period between 1994 and 1998 with the bulk of the material coming from 1995-96. This was also the period where Carter and Heather Murray began their journey as the duo Scorces and one can hear the genesis of that group’s elliptical sonic trajectories in a song like “Body Energy Exchange.” Elsewhere “Dream Mother” is mesmeric in its simple swaying repetition. “Going Down” is so timeless that it could be a rediscovered gem from a back porch somewhere between the Mississippi delta and Appalachia were it not for its fringes of bent dissonance and its tumultuous ending passage.
Carter has always valued direct emotion in her playing and Living Contact is no exception. The pieces feature cyclical acoustic guitar motifs with occasional vocals that draw the listener into her intimate world. The skeletal songwriting suits the instrumentation perfectly. Even the titles of the songs are remarkably evocative. One can almost imagine a shadowy backlit figure slowly materializing at an observed window in “Silhouette.” The monumental “Alone, Not Alone” is a heartbreakingly aching hymn to solitude in which Carter’s hovering vocals are the only salve to the lament opined by her guitar. Carter’s voice has matured immensely since these recordings, and recent releases such as Scorpiio Flower (on Wholly Other) show her in assured control of her vocal instrument, but the unguarded tentative fragility of tone heard here that has its own visceral power. It is the power of connection that has always been with her and one which it is our great fortune to be able to hear again.
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