An Interview with AC Carter: Director of the Lambda Celsius Collective
AC Carter is the head chair of The Lambda Celsius Collective, a nuanced group. The group includes various avatars, which give AC different perspectives and agencies. And Alexa, the smarmy AI with the best of intentions.
Lambda Celsius has opened for indie legends John Maus and Kevin Barnes, and collaborated with the godfather of home recording, R. Stevie Moore.
Before learning about the life and times of AC Carter, let’s introduce the collective:
- AC Carter: The person I interviewed. Entirely self-produced musician. Performer. Designer. Visual Artist. Organizer of Ad•verse Fest, a spectacle of a festival.
- Lambda Celsius: A musical avatar of AC Carter. Can be found on stage with fellow performer Alexa.
- Alexa: Yes, that Alexa. Always wanted to be a DJ. This is her break.
- Ana Echo: The avatar identified in Ana Echo and the Beauty of Indifference, Lambda Celsius’s third album. Ana has faced sexual and emotional trauma, and reconciles these struggles throughout the album.
- DJ .53: The newest avatar of the group. A former force of the music industry, before disappearing into obscurity. DJ .53 and Lambda Celsius have been collaborating recently. Groovy anthems are expected.
Let’s talk about these avatars. Is it a perspective thing?
Totally. It’s funny. One of my new characters is Vixcine Martine. She’s kind of me at school. Except she’s getting her doctorate in cultural histories. She’s interested in pop music and the development of an artist.
She analyzes the rising career of Lambda Celsius. I talk about gender roles and identity in my work and the different avatars give me a way to exercise those ideas. It’s weird, because in art school, you have to talk about what you’re doing all the time. And it’s hard to do that from my vantage point. As a strategy, I become another person analyzing my career.
That’s a cool method of doing new things, because it removes the self. It may push you in directions that you wouldn’t be comfortable with as yourself.
Yea, it’s like pretending!
Something I want to have in the next album is a collaboration between me and DJ .53. In the narrative Ana Echo is performing alongside this DJ that is popular in an internet space. Except, they’re really popular DJ-ing in like World of Warcraft, or something totally unrelated to the music world. He doesn’t have a Soundcloud or anything, but he has agency in the world.
So, these new songs are a collaboration. Ana is changing her identity because she doesn’t want to be confined to the hysteric, or the woman subordinate.
AC organized a showcase last year, ad∙verse fest. Here’s what they said about it.
It’s based off the desire to create space. I really want it to be diverse in genre and show lots of solo and duo acts. Also diverse in performance. There’s drag. There’s electronic. There’s DJ sets. There’s a girl named Jennifer Vanilla, who is like, larping on stage. She’s amazing.
Where is your career headed musically?
Probably more upbeat. A cleaner sound. Less hiss and reverb. The transients are a little more rounded.
I feel like Ana Echo, there’s a lot of reverb and it’s really gothy — not that this new stuff will be any less goth. Older stuff sounds sort of like Sisters of Mercy, whereas the newer stuff sounds sort of like 90s Bjork.
You can only be sad for so long, until it becomes exhausting and feels like a job. I can still confront these issues, but in an upbeat way.
You are self-taught musically. What was that learning process like?
I started playing bass guitar at 17. I was hanging around friends who did play music, took lessons, a sort of community of guys.
And it would bother me when we were all hanging out, and they would play, and it was me and their girlfriends, watching. I wanted to get involved. I didn’t know anything. I had to teach myself, like, what a note is versus a chord. How to read tabs.
Bass guitar was more interesting to me than guitar, because all the songs I gravitated towards, like Psycho Killer by Talking Heads, had killer bass lines. David Byrne is an inspiration. He didn’t know how to play until he was asked to be in a band. I thought: So there’s hope, I am not too late. I can figure this out.
I used the internet. I taught myself other songs like Human Nature by Michael Jackson. Rock Lobster by the B-52s.
And then in college I was playing noisy experimental music, mostly because I acquired all these pedals and had no idea what they did. Listening to sounds and playing with musical textures.
Have you had any epiphanies that changed the way you look at music? Or is it more a series of small discoveries?
I think about Tempo a lot. Many songs on Ana Echo and the Beauty of Indifference are slower. And the album deals with things I know of.
What I want to do for the next album is explore topics I don’t really know. Pretending as if I do. One song is about falling in love. I haven’t really fallen in love so I don’t know what that’s like. I’ve created a song questioning that. Having a crush, and them never seeing me because I am invisible behind a green screen.
Oh, but Ido have this one epiphany: In pop music, when I was growing up, the whole baby aesthetic was wild. I remember a photograph of Britney Spears on a bed holding a purple Teletubby. There’s another one where she is on a tricycle with Baby written on the back of her shorts.
How do I do that, but one step further? I’m thinking of Peter Pan and Grace Jones. An androgynous, agendered being that’s playing with Legos and highly-saturated colors. Is it edgy? Or cuteness?
You mentioned that your sculpting background informs your music-making. How so?
In art school, I was sculpting with different materials, and learning how to paint. And I was trying to use that vocabulary for music. It was a way for me to understand. Like, oh, I’m layering. And when I’m mixing it’s like a varnish on a painting. And wanting to make a color punchy is like making a sound stand out horizontally on an EQ mix, versus visually on a canvas. [On a canvas] it’s high fluorescence. I wanted my sound to be high fluorescence.
I guess I’m thinking of this more as picture making, but still elements of sculpture come into play. Like spatially, how do you place the sounds in the mix? Panning? Do you build out a sound to make it sound full or carve it out to be hollow to add another element later? How do you combine? Ah, it’s really the assemblage sculpture. You could say my sound is like a goth Jessica Stockholder.
How did your ideas transpire into your solo work?
At 23 there was a big transition. I had just graduated college, working at an art supply store, and was like, I cannot do this. I had a bad taste for the visual art world. It’s just not where I’m meant to be. It’s elitist. It’s classist. Music seemed to have more flexibility.
I moved out in the woods, with one of my other friends Tyler, who is so amazing. He is a photographer. And he had logic and a really basic recording setup. He was like, ‘yea AC, if you want to borrow this, go for it.’
It became non-work for me. Pure fun. Work fun? I wanted to learn so bad. I can’t tell you how many terrible songs I wrote. And I had no idea how to mix. I was like ‘What’s compression?’.
I had to learn how to hear. Active listening. Now when I hear songs, I know what is happening. And it’s exciting. It’s not as mystical as it used to be.
I couldn’t write essays but I could write songs. I think that having an idea and translating it into music really excites me. Through sound you can change and confuse the emotion. Wanting to investigate. Being self-critical without being self-deprecating, which is hard.
You made a decision to pre-record all instrumentation. You could play the instruments on stage. Do you put them aside to leave room for theatrics?
Yes. In a way, it’s like, play to your strengths. I’ve performed in many different variations. In a band. Bass Guitar while singing. A programmed drum machine. A DX7 and drum machine at the same time while singing.
There’s so many ways to perform.
I’m a visual artist, and can get in front of people. I’ve figured that out since graduate school. Presenting work, that’s acting. Teaching, that’s acting.
Yea.. even now, we’re sort of acting?
Life is a fucking stage. Which can be totally anxiety inducing. But at the same time I’m at ease with it.
The first time I sang on my tracks I connected with the audience in ways I previously couldn’t. It’d be different as a trained musician. But I’m not.
But I know how to make costumes and pose. I know how to sing and arrange songs. Okay, maybe I should be a front person and have a backing band. Perhaps in the future.
Your minimalist set-up seems to allow a lot of flexibility.
I really love that flexibility.
What can I fold up? The jacket for me is like a sculpture and a painting. I can fold it up and put it in a bag. A painted canvas that is 6x6 ft. Then it’s like, where am I going to store this. Who is going to buy this?
You changed attire several times throughout your performance yesterday.
There’s a few different things there. The giant workwear t-shirt is high visibility. It’s stimulating. It’s says “Danger, Men Working Above”. Basically, I appropriated a work-sign.
To put it in a different context, it becomes a political statement about misogyny or patriarchy, rather than a cut and dry “People are working!”.
Taking that off was similar to a cape. But I feel this one has more power to it.
The cheerleading costume is a way of being my own cheerleader and quasi-advertising. Thinking of it’s framing, if you’re a person with a vagina, sex sells. It’s inherent to the system. I’m participating in it in a goofy way. It may also have another pop culture reference but I’ll let you marinate on that one…
I also wanted to wear another costume with all these different colors. Androgynous and not-gender assigned. Which is an undercurrent of my work. To renegotiate what what non-binary folks have to do to make it in the industry.
What’s next?
Definitely still performing…touring. Playing a lot. I’m developing new visuals in Augmented Reality right now and digital animation. Working on new songs — another album out in early 2020.
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Check out Lambda Celsius’s latest single, Party of the Mind, here.
Find more Lambda Celsius music on Bandcamp, Spotify, or Soundcloud.
Check out Lambda Celsius’s website for more info!
