Lee AdcockFade in. Spotlight, on. On stage left is an ironing board, with a small Alexa and an iPhone. At stage center, Ana Echo leans toward the machines. “Alexa, play Lambda Celsius, Unknown Album from my library,” she says coolly. When Alexa doesn’t reply, Echo smiles, as if she’s pleased with the AI’s disobedience. She crouches lower, and repeats the request; this time Alexa understands, and queues up a ponderous beat. Echo runs through several stoic stances, and stares the crowd down with an icy glare. “I am not defined through my relationship to you,” she recites. “You ain’t gonna stop me.”
Tonight, AC Carter sits before me at a quaint little end table in the Metropolitan, with a chintzy lamp and two glasses of Pino Grigio between us. We slip into small talk about the Athens Popfest last month, where they opened at Little Kings as Lambda Celsius—or rather, as we discuss later, where one of Carter’s many personas represented the Lambda Celsius meta-crew. They’ve recently dyed their hair orange, in homage to Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics. Before long, we’re discussing the finer points of post-punk and new wave in the ‘80s. The lines in between draw us both—the androgyny of Grace Jones, the stylistic limbo as Joy Division shifted into New Order, the Human League’s transition from bleak sci-fi cult to ultra-polished pop group. “Which is interesting, because I feel like that’s kind of where [my] direction is going,” Carter replies.
That direction doesn’t just include the music. As the self-elected director of Lambda Celsius, the Birmingham-born artist dons multiple hats: musician, head writer, costume tailor, graphic designer, video producer. But it’s the performer in Carter that dictates every other aspect of the metaphysical troupe. Through that bundle of media, the artist can manifest the multitudes that compose their non-binary identity. Ana Echo carries the torch for the upcoming album Ana Echo and the Beauty of Indifference, with melancholic synth-pop that harkens to Carter’s ambiguous idols and repurposed objects of the domesticated female. But the next persona could transform everything.
The idea, of course, is to upbraid the patriarchy and shatter the passive stereotypes imposed upon the female body. That demands visibility, though, and Carter also intends to stamp their constellation of characters into the pop universe. Like Bowie, you might say, but, as Carter reminds me, the androgynous superstar didn’t design his most iconic costumes. They relate more to another interstellar band leader, Sun Ra. “Because of the social conditions presented to me, I don’t want to be of this world!” they say of him. “And I’m not serving you, man! I am performing, and you’re just here. I’m going to another world.” In describing the great jazz guru, Carter also sums up the mission of Lambda Celsius: self-creation leads to self-liberation.
Credit: Alexa Rivera
From dolls to gear
For Carter, the creative process started at playtime. At first, they designed clothes for toy dolls, and transformed the figures into their own cast of quirky actors. “At the time, I didn’t have the language to call them ‘they,’ but they were genderless,” they explain. “I was just like, she is she, but she’s also a tomboy, and asexual, and she [doesn’t] want to hang out with boys!”
But when Carter started to develop a taste for music, they couldn’t find the same outlet for self-expression so easily. “My grandmother forced my mom to play piano, and sing, and do recitals, and play guitar,” Carter explains. “And my mom developed a real hatred towards that, and didn’t want to put that on me.” So instead, their parents encouraged them to pursue other extracurriculars, like student council and “every frickin’ sport.” And Carter obliged. In fact, they almost won a scholarship for volleyball, but then turned it down. “I don’t like the competition,” they explain. “Because it’s so clear-cut. You win, and you lose.” So in their spare time, they learned bass guitar on their own, practicing to the B-52s, the Pixies, and the Talking Heads. The plan, naturally, was to get in a band.
Around the neighborhood, though, Carter had gained more notoriety for their skills as a painter. “In a town where people’s vocabulary for visual art was, ‘you can draw shit,’ that’s valid,” they say. But when Carter shifted to art school in Nashville to refine their brushwork, they soon found that their rougher style didn’t blow over so well with the elder professors. “All the people I would keep having in my studio, would just basically tell me, you’re not a very good painter,” they recall. Already, Carter sensed that gender bias was to blame. “If he does looseness, it’s, ‘Wow, look at that gesture.’ If she does looseness, it’s like, ‘That’s lazy.’ Buddy, I know what I’m fucking doing!”
As the gatekeepers continued to shut Carter out of the painting field, the budding bassist honed their musical chops. At first, they gigged with bunches of noise outfits around campus. Then, after Carter picked up drums, they found themselves with a boyfriend who produced his own band. All that gear sparked their old itch to create, but the language wrapped around production blocked their way, and as in childhood, they lacked the confidence to ask. However, when Carter moved out of town with a friend, they landed in yet another house full of recording equipment. The serendipity was too sweet to ignore, so before long, the former painter tried their hand at production. “The way that I EQed things would hurt your ears,” they recall. “I was doing the worst stuff. But eventually, if you just keep working at something, you will get better.”
At this point in the conversation, I recall an old expression, that anyone who clocks in so many hours at any skill can claim mastery. But that didn’t seem to be Carter’s case with painting. Critics still shunned their work, and the whole process felt like a chore anyway. So Carter finally told themselves, “You know what? Maybe I’m not a painter. And that’s a good thing, because maybe I’m not a painter, I’m a performance artist. And all the elements that go into that—the prop-making, the script, the staging, the lights, the color, the costuming, the vocalization, the writing of the lyrics, the making of the website, the taking the photos, the modeling—all that shit are my strengths. So you know what? Thank you. Maybe actually, y’all were right.” Here they pause, and smirk in the lamplight. “But I can still paint. I will say that.”
Taking Back the Echo
Fade in. We’re now in a classroom at the University of Georgia, where Vixcine Marteen stands stage left before a massive projector screen. In one hand she holds a microphone; with her other, she gestures to the next bulletin of her PowerPoint presentation. “So, costumes,” she begins, and pauses to straighten the top half of her pink power suit. “So each costume represents a different identity. And each costume is also created by the artist herself, so…” She stops, and grins broadly. “Well, first, isn’t that so cool?!”
At first blush, the many faces of Lambda Celsius may seem like just a high-concept shtick. But when the young Carter customized their dolls, they learned early on how to manipulate gender, and so, as an adult, the artist uses characters to explore (and circumvent) conventional gender roles. Fellow performer Jennifer Vanilla inspired Carter to think about such identities when they played together in Nashville last year, not long after Carter had moved to Athens. “She asked me, ‘Who is Lambda Celsius? Who are they? Or who is she?’” they recall. “And I was like, ‘Oh shit. I don’t actually know.’”
Now, of course, Carter has several answers. There’s Ana Echo, the current stage presence and “LiveJournal” rep of the cast who comments through minimal synth-pop on the social constraints imposed on their body. Vixcine Marteen, the LinkedIn ambassador for the crew, is the bustling PhD student and obsessive mega-fan who explains Lambda Celsius to the public. (Carter is also in grad school at UGA, but they prefer Marteen to do the talking: “It’s difficult to describe your own work… the conversation never goes in the way that I want.”)
And then there’s .53, the “EDM guy” and SoundCloud persona that enthralls audiences with his expertise. Not too long ago, Carter showcased in an Instagram story a hooded, sky blue felt poncho for the bloke, with “.53” cut out from the front. If that seems a bit crude for the master tailor, you’re not wrong; Carter invented .53 to critique lazy cis white males in the music world. “[When you’re male,] it’s easier to do anything, and people be like, that’s cool,” they say. “[In] about any genre of music, if you’re not cis and white and male, you pretty much get co-opted. They’re like, ‘That’s cool, you don’t get to have a life from that. Sorry, Frankie Knuckles, I’m going to take techno from you.’”
Likewise, the invention of Ana Echo stemmed from a deep dive into how men have shunted women into support roles for centuries. Carter was reading a textbook on the “narcissistic echo” in cinematography, or women who appear only to speak to their male counterpart. The term refers to the Greek myth of Echo, a nymph who was cursed by the goddess Hera to only recite the last words spoken to her, so when she met Narcissus and fell in love with him, she could only watch helplessly as he fell in love with himself. Another myth speaks of Pygmalion, the sculptor who created a woman so beautiful that he became enamored with her. A screenplay by George Bernard Shaw granted agency to the “sculpted” flower girl Eliza Doolittle in his take on the tale, but the more popular version, aka the musical My Fair Lady, turns her back to the clever creator Henry Higgins in the end.
Carter was intrigued, especially when they soon realized that the narcissistic echo reverberated outside of film. “I was doing some Amazon shopping, and I was like, wait wait wait,” they tell me. “[Their] thing is called the Amazon Echo. Are you fucking kidding me? No! And HER name, HER name, is Alexa.” We talk about how male engineers have created so many domesticated female AI personalities, as modern-day Galateas and Doolittles, while the rare male AI become trustworthy experts who guide the user, like how Google’s Max steers consumers to the best songs. But in Lambda Celsius, Alexa isn’t the mistress or servant, she’s the DJ. So when Carter mounts her onto the ironing board, they’re not just freeing themselves from the ubiquitous laptop set-up that many DIY electronic artists rely on—they’re also trying to liberate the home device from its passive role in the household.
Around this point, we discuss the stereotype of the music auteur—the white guy with the shelves and shelves of vinyl. “Let me tell you some arbitrary shit on this record that you’ve never heard of, woman!” Carter says. “I’m trying to impress you, so really, the goal is to rape you. That isn’t just from experience. That is from documentation from academic research, in books that you can find at the library. So, look it up, dude!” We laugh out loud at this. “I feel like I scare men sometimes,” they note. “At the same time, I’m like, I don’t care anymore!”
Credit: Alexa Rivera
Sharing the Aura
Carter does care, though. As an artist concerned with identity, the performer intends to create space for other voices beyond their own, outside the order established by archetypal vinyl hoarders. This album cycle hones in on the tether between the patriarchy and the female body, but Carter frequently holds up artists of color as innovators also usurped out of history, like dreampop pioneer A.R. Kane and unsung shoegaze heroes the Veldt. Just as male feminists can understand and respect Lambda Celsius in spite of their privilege, Carter hopes to embrace the stories and viewpoints of non-white folks.
As Carter and I wade waist-deep into further discourse on politics in art, a fellow performer named McCormack pops over to say hello. At our mutual behest, they pull up a chair and sit between us at the table. McCormack’s act entails using the body to eschew language and communicate more directly. “I’d take my top off and turn to people, or I dance in front of people,” they explain to me. “And they say, ‘Oh, you made yourself very vulnerable for us,’ and I’m like, ‘What? No, I made myself very immediate for you.” They don’t know it, but we’ve touched extensively on the limitations of language throughout our conversation. Carter had to grasp the vast technical lingo of producers to earn competency as an acolyte. The non-binary pronoun can be confusing, even though it conveys a crucial concept (“Aren’t we also not singular?” they point out).
Many an artist would wince at the prospect of a colleague beating them to the conceptual punch. In our discussion, Carter references Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” which established the authority, or “aura” of an original art object. Today, we strive for that aura in ourselves. But with Lambda Celsius, Carter hopes to dismantle that anxiety. On the album, songs like “Simulacrum” draw attention to the paranoia that swirls around our personal drive for uniqueness; “Fashionable Linguistics” alerts us to how outside forces co-opt the language of self-creation to sell those experiences back at us.
“Why does it have to be a bad thing, to be similar, or to have a similar idea with someone else?” Carter asks. “In heteronormative cultures, it seems so much a competition between other individuals, because everything is hyper-sexualized. But then when you go into any arena where people identify as queer, people respect you.”
And true to form, Carter does welcome collaboration in Lambda Celsius. Granted, all the integral parts of their identities—namely, the costumes and most of the songwriting—remain firmly under their control. But Athens polymath Terence Chiyezhan, aka Murk Daddy Flex, mastered the new album and wrote the track to “Fashionable Linguistics,” while outside producers like Taylor Chicoine at the Pity Party and Benjamin Schurr at Blight Studios in DC lent both a hand with the mixing. And, as Carter tells McCormack, they were also about to shoot a video for “The Beauty of Indifference” with plenty of friends for extras. “The last album was just all me, and something about that seems sort of sterile and ego-driven,” Carter says. “Which is fine, because I needed to prove to myself that I could do one on my own.”
But Carter wasn’t completely alone on their self-titled debut. The opener “At Least You Make Me Feel” features fellow Nashville resident R. Stevie Moore, the legendary outsider who pioneered bedroom recording back in the late ‘70s. “I don’t even remember how [that happened],” they recall. “I think I sent him a track, and he was like, ‘Oh my god, I love it!’ And [then] he was like, ‘Can I record something on it?’ I’m still nobody, but I’ve been validated by the DIY god.”
There’s another limbo. While Carter aspires for some level of fame, they don’t want to lose a sense of humility. “I know what I’m doing right now is worthwhile, and I feel confident in that,” they say. “But I also know, there’s still room to grow, and there’s still room to learn, and there’s still different avenues I need to investigate, that I haven’t yet. And I’m excited about that position. And I don’t ever want to get to that position where I’m like, I’m hot shit! That’s scary.” It’s a healthy balance to strike, I assure them; indeed, we had plotted to turn the tables of the interview, where they would flip the focus on me. But then another friend and local scenester Lacey drops in to say hello, and so I finally switch off the recorder. The curtains may close for now, but the next act in Carter’s multifaceted journey has only just begun.
Ana Echo and the Beauty of Indifference is out Sept. 28 via Banana Tapes and Scorpion Beach.
Lambda Celsius will host a listening party for Ana Echo and the Beauty of Indifference tomorrow night, Sept. 26, at the World Famous. Doors open at 8 p.m. Admission is FREE.
More Info
Web: accarter.net
Bandcamp: lambdacelsius.bandcamp.com
Facebook: @lambdacelsius
Instagram: @lambda_celsius
SoundCloud: @lambdacelsius