CHRIS CARTER has
announced a new album, 'Chris Carter’s Chemistry Lessons Volume
One' - his first solo release in 17 years - out on 30 March
2018.
Listen to the first
track to be taken from the album, ‘Blissters’, here:
'Chris Carter’s Chemistry Lessons Volume One' is populated with insistent melodic
patterns and a distinct sense of wonderment at the limitless
possibilities of science. “If there’s an influence on the
album, it’s definitely ‘60s radiophonic,” Carter
says. “Over the last few years I’ve also been listening to
old English folk music, almost like a guilty pleasure, and so some of
tracks on the album hark back to an almost ingrained DNA we have for
those kinds of melodies. They’re not dissimilar
to nursery rhymes in some ways.”
That combination of
traditional music and the backing track for exciting, potential
futures gives tracks like ‘Moon Two’ and ‘Tangerines’ a sheen
of inquisitiveness and quiet euphoria, while ‘Modularity’ and
‘Roane’ have an anxious, sci-fi noir charm. Elsewhere skewed
voices add a calming, human note to the album. Carter
explains, “Sleazy and I had worked together on ways of
developing a sort of artificial singing using software and hardware.
This was me trying to take it a step further. I've taken lyrics, my
own voice or people's voices from a collection that I'd put together
with Sleazy, and I’ve chopped them up and done all sorts of weird
things with them.” These moments sit alongside tracks where
melodies have a dissonant, noisy, awkwardness that ties the music on
CCCL Volume 1 back to the Throbbing Gristle legacy.
As a founding member of
Throbbing Gristle alongside Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter ‘Sleazy’
Christopherson and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Chris Carter has had a
significant role in the development of electronic music - a journey
which has continued through his releases as one half of Chris &
Cosey and Carter Tutti and a third of Carter Tutti Void - as well as
with his own solo and collaborative releases.
He is also credited
with the invention and production of groundbreaking electronics -
from the legendary Gristleizer home-soldered effects unit through to
the Dirty Carter Experimental Sound Generating Instrument and the
sold-out TG One Eurorack module designed with Tiptop Audio (issued to
commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Throbbing Gristle’s Second
Annual Report) - Carter has created the means to make sounds as well
as making the sounds themselves.
The 25-track album was
recorded in Carter’s own Norfolk studio and the artwork and
accompanying videos were self-created, taking cues in part from
battered old experimental BBC broadcast LPs.
Despite having been
worked on over an extended period between various artistic projects
in a variety of different moods, situations and circumstances, CCCL
Volume 1’s experiments never feel like Carter noodling around
aimlessly in his studio-laboratory. Instead there is an inner
coherence and a distinctively Chris Carter approach to sound and
execution that showcases the sonic scientist’s restless, questing
creative spirit forever scouting for new ideas.
Chris Carter’s
Chemistry Lessons Volume One:
Blissters
Tangerines
Nineteen 7
Cernubicua
Pillars of Wah
Modularity
Field Depth
Moon Two
Durlin
Corvus
Tones Map
Dust & Spiders
Gradients
Lab Test
Shidreke
Uysring
Ghosting
Noise Floor
Post Industrial
Rehndim
Roane
Time Curious Glows
Ars Vetus
Hobbs End
Inkstain
Pre-order available
HERE.