Infinite Flux

Guitarist Eric Carbonara offers a glimpse of Paradise before returning to India.

by A.D. Amorosi

[ world/jazz ]

"I can't finish a piece until I feel a sense of closure to whatever the piece is about," says Eric Carbonara. "In that way, the music is a victim to my life."

Perhaps that's why The Paradise Abyss — his new solo instrumental album featuring seven personal autobiographical narratives — took two years to write. The Upper Darby guitarist used a friction peg flamenco guitar and techniques borrowed from Andalusian Romany, Hindustani, North African and Western classical guitar music to shape what he calls thematic song poems.

"Each of the pieces went through a variety of endings and transitions," he says. "They develop as my life unfolds, so they can often take a long time to finish."

Next week, life is taking him to Kolkata, India, where he'll again study with master slide guitarist Debashish Bhattacharya.

Carbonara, who grew up in the woods and cornfields of State College, stuck around his hometown to study anthropology at Penn State. There he got into ethnic music and ethnographic film, traded a Gibson SG for a sitar and took a semester in New Zealand, where ethnomusicologists turned him onto gamelan and Indian music. He barely let his graduation cap hit the ground before he was studying sitar at the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, Calif.

"That was mind-blowing, to sit with Ustad Ali Akbar Khan," says Carbonara. "I have a vivid memory of when he asked me to get his sarod, how I was holding something that'd been used to transmit so much beauty and emotion." Carbonara's devotion earned him the chance to be a full-time student in Jamshedpur, but India and Pakistan were escalating their ancient war over Kashmir at the time. "My teacher kept saying, it's OK, you can come, if you keep love in your heart, you will be safe. My parents called me nuts and said you're not going over there."

Carbonara shelved the idea after a bombing in Delhi. Anxious to get out of State College, he found a warehouse in Kensington in 2001, spent the money he saved for India on equipment and started recording albums like Toward a Center of Infinite Flux and Exodus Bulldornadius. An upcoming devotional effort with harpist Jesse Sparhawk, Sixty Strings, references the number of strings shared between the lever harp (38 strings) and Carbonara's 22-string hand-built upright Indian chaturangui. When he finally set foot on Indian soil in 2008 — the day terrorists killed 166 people in Mumbai — he found a country of converging polar extremes of religion and tradition. "It must appease my Gemini nature," he says.

Convention has never been the guitarist's strong suit. When he was a kid he had an instrumental acid-psych group with the unfortunate name of Jason Likes Science. "But I never actually learned how to play. Never had a teacher until Ali Akbar College. I still don't know how to read, write music or hold the guitar in the correct way." He collected reel-to-reel analog recorders, became obsessed with doing "Frippertronics" and spent a Philadelphia minute in the band Soft People trying to imitate Tom Verlaine, to no avail. "A big part of me really wants to be in a more traditional band, but every time I try I just find that I'm kind of bad at it."

Yet for all his disavowing of pop convention and structure, The Paradise Abyss' softly spun spare melodies and twitchy pluckings connect with the force of a Bacharach or a Beatle. "My brain sends a signal to my hands, which plucks the strings, makes the melody, the strings vibrate molecules and force changes in air pressure, which are picked up by a listener's ears, which sends a signal to their brain, which finally sends a signal to their heart, where they hopefully feel what I feel."

Carbonara has no ambition to strictly play Indian, flamenco or any other kind of music. He simply wants to develop a vast vocabulary of techniques to express himself with a form of pidgin language. "I'm not a spiritual person in most respects but I do devote myself to being a conduit through which musical and universal truth speaks."

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)