Haunt

Providence's Area C — Erik Carlson, assisted here by Jeff Knoch (Eyes like Saucers) — offers a loving tribute to the harmonic possibilities of the Farfisa organ on Haunt, one of Carlson's few readily available recordings (Much of Area C's catalog lives on limited-run cassettes and CD-Rs.) Across five long songs and one short one, Farfisas face off with guitars in an unblinking stare-down, shifting weight up and down the octaves as they circle each other. The music drones at its core, with slippery near-unison lines that toss harmonic sparks as they tangle, queasy and electric. But there's an unusual amount of movement inside. Area C are clearly inspired by the long, bowed lines of Phill Niblock and Tony Conrad, but they never focus all their attention on the horizontal. Pumping organs and incidental guitars wheeze and stumble, blossoming into blocky chords and daydream vectors, following idle lines inspired by ragas, blues and even tango.

Carlson writes that the title, borrowed from a chapbook by Providence poet Keith Waldrop, refers to places and states of mind to which "we return to again and again, sometimes obsessively, sometimes in a somnambulistic trance." Indeed, it's hard not to be sucked into… read more »