Thomas Carnacki scores your Saturday evening on October 3rd for this edition of KALX Live! Penny Royal is your host kicking things off in preparation of a live performance, interview, and side quests through our live archives. You can explore more music on Bandcamp.
Thomas Carnacki is a variably-sized entity engaged in unsettling textures, organic sources, occasional flights of whimsy, and (aspirationally) subtle nuance. Though sometimes brief spasms of wanton abandon enter the proceedings. For this current evening, the instantiation will be Gregory Hagan, Cheryl E. Leonard and Gregory Scharpen. Live performances have included appearances in the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, 23five’s Activating The Medium, Project Soundwave, multiple Illuminated Corridors, and even (snuck in through a side door) the Whitney Biennial.
Carnacki music has appeared in numerous films, theatre pieces, and internationally-touring dance performances, including an evening-length work by Margaret Jenkins that toured Sweden. Notable guests/collaborators over the two-decades of performing and recording have included Carla Bozulich (Geraldine Fibbers, Evangelista), M.S. Waldron (irr app. (ext.), Nurse With Wound), Dawn McCarthy (Faun Fables), Carla Kihlstedt (Sleepytime Gorilla Museum), Moe Staiano (Surplus 1980), Emily Jane White, Matmos, Kristine Barrett (Kitka), Juliet Gordon (Luxury Skin) and countless others. Carnacki has released over a dozen records of varying in sizes (from 3” to 12”), about which people have opined things such as: “ectoplasmic tendrils form unfathomable noises as unknown machines creak, click, and rattle.” [brainwashed] and “a beautifully engaging and evolving series of crafted textures and tones to orbit our ears and enter our unconscious. The result is an evocative dimension akin to Burroughs’ Interzone, whose definition works equally well in describing Carnacki’s soundworld: ‘where three-dimensional fact merges into dream, and dreams erupt into the real world…'” [the Quietus]. And that Carnacki “attempts to open up listeners’ worldview to the things that are best ignored; tapping into mental states that may tap back.” Which, in context, is intended as a compliment, and we take it as such.
