Area C

Haunt is a swirl of Farfisa organs, loops, stretched-out guitar, and the fragmented, fractured beats of an analog drum machine and tube amplifier static. The album was recorded by Erik Carlson & Jeff Knoch late 2005. What began as a plan to record a dual-Farfisa album (both Erik & Jeff are Farfisa aficionados) quickly and organically turned into much more. The two musicians convened and over the course of two brief sessions, spun out a sequence of songs whose repetitions and details hold much more than the surfaces first reveal. These spontaneous compositions emerged fully formed with barely a pause to switch tape, the only addition being a similarly inspired track recorded live on a radio performance in early 2006. The title, Haunt, refers to frequented places or states of mind, places we return to again and again, sometimes obsessively, sometimes in a somnambulistic trance. These are not ghost stories, but we can't deny the unexplained other's spectral presence (as in so many of AREA C's compositions). The title was originally inspired by a book of the same name by poet Keith Waldrop. Remnants of other times and places, outdated technologies, signals sent out but never received -- this is the bed over which Erik & Jeff layered their revolving organ lines and pulses. The results are mesmerizing.