by Bart de Paepe

Growing up I listened to the radio a lot. Figuring out that when you turned the dial the station changed was really cool. So I heard rock, soul, disco, country, European classical, Indian classical, Irish folk music, polka, punk, hardcore etc etc etc. My mom started buying records for me pretty early so I had a lot of 45s and LPs from about 4 yrs old on...the first ones I bought I think were at a garage sale of some friends of our family that lived in the same town home complex. My friend, a girl named Jamie had mono at the time and it seemed really cool to me because she would just sit in this chair w a blanket over her all of the time. The 45s I got my parents to buy were from her older sister whose name I can't remember. They were the turtles "Eleanor" and the beach boys "wouldn't it be nice" but my favorite songs of that time were "soldier boy" and "sea cruise" - can't remember who they're by...later on I got records by Michael Jackson, Shaun Cassidy, Donna Summer, Barbara stressed, Mamas and the Papas, Pat beater, Quarterflash, The Rolling Stones, The Bee gees, Kate Bush, Japan, The Stray Cats, Duran Duran, spandex Ballet, Lords of the New Church, The Church, The March Violets, Cyndi Lauper, Blue Angel, The Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees, New Order, The Dream Syndicate, Cabaret Voltaire, Joy Division, The Doors, Psychedelic Furs...a lotta new wave...

First time I got a guitar it was on a visit w my parents to Mexico City, Mexico when I was like ten years old. They picked up a cheap acoustic at a street market. I musta asked for it. I remember sitting in the hotel room trying to play it and getting really frustrated. Then I vaguely remember one lesson through the church we went to every Sunday and hating it and refusing to go back. Then not playing the guitar again (besides messing around with the bass guitar Jim had sometimes) until shortly before we started Charalambides in '90 or thereabouts. My roommate at the time, David Keith, had several electric guitars and I started to pick them up and play in my room without an amp. Just sort of repeating the same things over and over and I really loved the feeling of the strings and the sound and just kept going at it that way for quite a while...I think I was inspired to ask for the acoustic in Mexico by seeing/hearing men singing and playing and walking around in the streets and loving the sound of that...I don't know, I always had myself playing guitar in band fantasies from high school on for some reason. Maybe because my best friend in 10th grade Stacey Mead really wanted to play bass...later on my friends who were in bands were definitely inspiring, I would say more so than musicians I knew from listening to records...friends like my roommate David Keith from Bleachbath, Roberto Cofresi and Fletcher Etheridge from dry nod, John Cramer from Bongtooth/The Mike Gunn, Ramon Medina from Bongtooth/Henry Miller from New York/Smile 69/Linus Pauling Quartet, and Jim Otterson from Smile 69.... oh, and Tom Carter from The Mike Gunn...

No, not really...none, or one - it depends on what you mean...when I was about 18 yrs old my boyfriend at the time Jim bought a bass guitar and started to answer newspaper ads looking for bassists. Those situations were pretty much ridiculous - he could barely play and was trying to join reggae and tejano bands. Finally we met a guy named Ivan Berry at the university of Houston who wanted to start a band so that he'd have people to play his songs and some covers like "I fall to pieces" originally sung by Patsy Cline. So, I would go over and practice w them sometimes. Ivan had weird ideas. Not particularly good ideas, but interesting all the same. He wanted to play a song backwards for instance...I was drafted to be the singer and do that patsy cline number as well as some berry penned compositions like "Disco in Rio" (let's see the lyrics I remember are "Disco in Rio, it's my favorite place to go, disco in Rio where the sand is so white and the sun is so bright") which was supposed to be a sort of smoky number...and I wrote a song even which was something about "muddy waters flow what the bottom knows, muddy waters know what's at the bottom"...hmmm...the thing was the guys were all pretty open to my doing whatever despite the lean towards the country/lounge chanteuse thing - which was completely unsuccessful, if you ever try to sing "I Fall to Pieces" you'll see what I mean. Didn’t have what it takes then or now! But, I even played drums occasionally and couldn't play them very well at all compared to rusty who was the official drummer but it didn't really matter...so, Ivan moved to Denton, Texas to go to a different university and the band broke up without fulfilling our dream of playing live at the artsy pizza place in town, Jim went on to play in Sasquatch 2000, don't know what happened to rusty and the next time I played music was in Charalambides...except for one visit to Denton when I sang while Ivan and his new group of friends jammed. It was cool because I distinctly remember their positive response to my singing. Maybe that was the first time I improvised in singing/music with other people? I used to improvise a lot on the piano. We didn't own one, but a couple of families I babysat for had pianos. Didn’t really conceive of what I was doing as improvising, but just you know thinking "I want to play this thing and I don't have the patience to try to 'learn' so I’m just gonna do whatever I feel like"...

Definitely an interesting scene in Houston...it pretty much centered around the record exchange (record store), KPFT and KTRU (local radio stations), the Pik n Pak (icehouse owned by Ralph, an older hippy dude that used to hang out w Colonel Bruce Hampton in Georgia) and the axiom (club owned by J.R. Delgado from The Party Owls - I think -/Sugar Shack)... there were these older folks, mostly about a decade older who had been around for the crazy punk art days and were keeping things going and that's who my friends and I sort of learned from and got inspired by as well as each other. Houston was/is a huge city and you could really lose yourself there...when I think of Houston I think of wild, rebellious people who just kept doing what they wanted to do despite no or very little interest outside of a small group of friends...three day stubble and the pain teens have to be mentioned as two groups who were definitely doing their own thing and kinda showing the way to some of us slightly younger folks...some more people from that time period or slightly before are Mr. Lee aka Kangaroo Court who went on to start Ventricle Records and kick ass with his then partner Treva in the group Mauve Sideshow. Ronnie Bond and the awesome band Really Red; Chuck Roast and Austin Caustic who were radio 'personalities' on KPFT with the Funhouse Show that played all manner of nutso experimental, punk and hardcore music. And Perry Webb from the awesome band Culturcide who went almost fully over to the visual art side of things for quite a while. Jim Pirtle who was into the whole polyester, found art, records as art objects thing who later went on to buy an entire building downtown and opened a bar/performance space there which was unheard of at the time because downtown was really a ghost town. And of course, just knowing Jandek was living there, out there somewhere in Houston, it really made us feel like "wow, this is a really weird and fucked up, incredible place with some kind of special bizarre energy"... I'll always be in love with Houston and probably never be able to adequately explain why. Hopefully someone'll write a book someday that'll help me figure out the pull... because Houston definitely has a pull. It was hard to get out of there!

The first Charalambides shows were a lot like they are right now. Using basic song elements as a starting point, stretching them out, changing them...we used to bring a lot more little instruments: keyboards, bells, flutes, etc. now it's just two electric guitars and voice...audiences, when there was an audience, were pretty nonchalant for the most part. In Houston there'd be a few friends - literally like two to five people - and they were pretty supportive. Sometimes it's easy to take your friends for granted, not realize what they're doing. Some of that went on for all of us in relation to each other's music, and I try not to do that anymore! But in the beginning too we were pretty ambivalent about playing live and that must have come across and influenced the audience's reaction - "do they care? I’m not sure they do. I’m not sure if I care then"...

Sometimes I/we start from recorded songs - actually have been doing that a lot lately. Also, I/we improvise from scratch as well depending on the mood of the night...completely different? I guess I’d say _very_ different...sometimes I use the same words to another song over a different improvised melody. Sometimes an improvised all guitar solo set...there's so many different combinations that can be used to approach it. Though I think it's pretty safe to say it's going to sound like Charalambides or me solo. It’s going to not feel like you're listening to/seeing a stranger...

Tom and I met Heather when she was about 15 years old or so through the record store we were working at. She was a regular customer who was obviously really into music. We talked at the store for years, then eventually tom and I asked her and her partner Shawn at the time to come over to our place, hang out and listen to records. Soon we were doing that quite a bit. It was around the time our Siltbreeze record "Union" came out and they also had started doing music together so we'd play each other's recent recordings for each other, which was a lot of fun. Went on some road trips together, a particularly memorable one was driving from Houston to Detroit and Cincinnati to catch two dead c shows... Tom and I were immediately awed by Shawn and Heather's music, but kept our projects fairly separate until about 2000, though we did have a couple of jams together before that... Heather and I did record together in ‘96, which later came out as the first Scorces CD, but we didn't realize we were Scorces at that point. Scorces became a recognized entity after heather joined Charalambides. As with a lot of things in our musical life, the catalyst was our friend David Dove asking heather and I to play a show at a space he organized performances at. Dave is still in Houston doing really cool stuff including running a branch of the Pauline Oliveros foundation there and teaching an improvisation workshop for teenagers...

The early records do sound a lot different. Kranky is going to continue to do reissues of our stuff and the next one planned is a double LP and CD version of "Our Bed is Green" album which was our first ever release (the Time-Lag label is doing the vinyl of that)... but yeah, it sounds different but I would say improvisation and songs both have always been important just utilized in different ways. The evolution it seems like would be mainly in vertical vs. horizontal improvisation. In other words we got out of multi-tracking for quite a while and concentrated on more documentary approaches. Also, thinking in terms of longer stretches of time, improvising in real time, what we could actually play live...now, we've kinda swung back in the other direction thinking more in terms of overdubs and crafting pieces of music/songs in that way...also, another development was paring back instrumentation. Getting it down to the very basics - guitar and voice.

The first thing I planned to release under my own name was what eventually became the "Bastard Wing" LP. It took a long time to come together, but Eclipse Records put it out... I guess it had to do with becoming more confident about myself as a separate musician. But, at the time I just felt really inspired by the piano that was in the practice space and I guess had a kind of feeling that what I wanted to do with it was something that had to be done on my own... the idea grew from there, to keep releasing stuff solo... and also, realizing that music is what I want to be doing all of the time. So, with Tom and I relocating to different parts of the country and wanting to keep busy it makes sense to provide opportunities for myself as an individual. I think Tom's reasoning is fairly similar...

I’ve started to play more with other guitar players and other musicians
more in the past couple of years... I don't do it that often but it
definitely impacts the way I approach my own guitar playing...it seems to give me more confidence and to free my physical movements more...

I’m interested in expressing an internal thought and emotion processes
through the physical body processes of playing instruments and singing and having the people listening interpret those things into stories or moods. So I guess ultimately I’m interested in creating all of those things...

The stuff on the planets cassette comes from live recordings, and at the time that the shows were taped I didn't know that they'd eventually be used for anything in particular... when Lieven asked me to do the tape I went back over the recordings that I’d recently received of those shows and liked them and thought they'd be good for the tape, and decided to use them. For the past two years or so, I’ve been more interested in the immediate experience of playing live and audience energy and less interested in sitting down to record away from that...

I wrote poetry in middle school and high school then took a long break from it because of a bit of teenage hubris. A friend confronted me about my inability to appreciate her boyfriend's writing and it made me take a step back and admit that she was right - I wasn't able to appreciate the effort he put into it - and so I quit, with the thought that writing was separating me from other people... then Byron Coley asked me for a contribution to a poetry anthology and something clicked for me to go ahead and give it a try. And so I’ve kept it up a bit in the past few years... it is different from the song lyrics sometimes, sometimes similar... sometimes poems written entirely separately from music have become the lyrics to songs... I think the poems that stay poems and don't become songs tend to have more words or more concrete imagery.