Tom Carter/ Christian Kiefer - A Rather Solemn Promise

A musical landscape that is intense, searching, and emotionally resonant in ways that are unexpected and unwarranted. Tom Carter, has spent his entire career in the world of improvisational music, with his regular group Charalambides, as a solo performer, and as a member of various other groups devoted to free improvisation and psych-folk. Christian Kiefer, is primarily known for three releases on Australia’s legendary experimental music label, Extreme, albums that waffle between folk-ambience soundscapes and singersongwriter material. The product of their meeting is experimental music, Carter and Kiefer performing live improvisations directly to the recorder and is presented here edited but without a single overdub. The beauty of the music lay it the way it which moments of droning, searching, atonal sound coalesces suddenly into chord-based, tonal music, only to fly away again. The process continues without plan, intuitively the music breaks, connects, breaks, connects again, as Carter switches from lap steel to acoustic resonator and Kiefer switches from resonator to banjo and then to dulcimer. Each artist’s technique informs the other: Carter’s slabs of sound pressing Kiefer’s playing into more abstract moments, and Kiefer’s tendency to search out melody encouraging similar playing from Carter’s guitar. When the afternoon was over, Kiefer set about editing down the two hours of recorded sound into an album-length release.

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