Guitarist Tom Carter Refines His Definition Of Psychedelia

“August Is All,” the 22-minute opening track on guitarist Tom Carter’s recent double album “Long Time Underground,” starts with a single, repeated tone that quickly spreads out, virus-like, into gentle dissonance.

Ten minutes pass in a blink; over an insistent drone, the texture grows and softens. So does the listener, becoming invested in and open to various outcomes — accumulated bits of melody, changes in timbre, subtle suggestions of pulse and meter — like a child’s first exposure to organized sound.

Whether that disposition is what’s meant by “psychedelic,” a term often applied to Carter’s music, is up for debate.

“Now, I’d much rather say that I play music, rather than ‘psychedelic music,'” Carter says. “I definitely feel I’m part of the tradition of psychedelic music, and that’s a lot of what I listen to.”

Carter plays a solo set at Lyric Hall in New Haven on Wednesday, June 1, on a bill with Connecticut bands Landing and Shinnirs (Joe and Dawn from Willimantic Records) along with Spray Paint, from Austin, Texas.

Carter is best known for co-founding the Texas experimental-folk duo Charalambides with Christina Carter, his ex-wife. “Exile,” Charalambides’ most recent record, came out in 2011, and the Carters plan to record more music together soon.

“When I lived in Texas, both Christina and I felt strongly connected to the Houston psychedelic tradition,” Carter says, “and I think really aspired to see ourselves in that context. Since then, to me, psychedelic music has come to mean something more specific in my own mind. Applying too broad a definition makes it meaningless. If you say, ‘Any music is psychedelic music …’ Yes, that’s true, but psychedelic isn’t anything that’s necessarily inherent to music. It’s inherent in the listener.”

Since relocating to New York, Carter has focused on instrumental solo and duo recordings, merging composed music with improvisational flights, using electronics and loops in unique, mind-expanding ways.

In certain circles, “Long Time Underground,” released in 2015 on Three Lobed Records, was a hit, receiving critical raves from taste-making sites like Pitchfork (the album topped its yearly list of experimental albums) and Relix.

The album, along with all of Carter’s recent music, almost didn’t happen: Earlier this decade, while touring in Europe with Charalambides, Carter came down with pneumonia. He spent 40 days and nights in an ICU in Berlin, was placed into a medically induced coma and spent an additional 2 1/2 weeks in a physical rehabilitation facility.

“When I was first coming out of it, I couldn’t even move,” Carter says. “I couldn’t read because I couldn’t hold a book steady. You have to regain the use of your body, essentially, which is why I had to go to rehabilitation. I couldn’t do that from a hospital bed.”

Within weeks of waking up, Carter regained most of his ability to use his hands.

“I wasn’t really playing guitar until I got back to the U.S.,” he says. “I never lost any sort of ability in that department. I definitely wanted to get right back into it. I suddenly found myself without a job, so there really wasn’t anything else to do. It’s one of the biggest things in my life, so I wanted to pick it up and resume it.”

The eventual recording of “Long Time Underground” completed a trilogy of works that began with 2009’s “The Dance From Which All Dances Come” and continued with “Numinal Entry,” released in 2014. “August is All,” “Beauty Draws the Seed” and “Colors For N,” composed years earlier, were subsequently refined in live performance. For the rest of “Long Time Underground,” Carter says, he just sat down with his guitar and played.

“I had wanted to make a double album for a while,” Carter says. “I don’t know if it’s much of an issue anymore, because I’ve been making long records since CDs came out. Maybe in the last few years there’s been a tendency to keep things to a more manageable length. This time I definitely wanted to say everything that I wanted to say.”

Much of Carter’s trilogy involves a loop pedal, a popular device that allows an artist to record short passages on the fly, and then to improvise or add composed parts on top. For Carter, it was about “being in a dialogue with that thing and trying to figure out what I can do with it that supports the composition, rather than driving it,” he says. “The trilogy deals with that question, whereas the music I’m doing now is a little more exploratory.”

Carter currently works with oscillating and distortion effects, “various things that chop up the sound a bit, not necessarily making the sound rougher,” he says. “I tend to base things around compositions, and the compositions I’m currently working with are scraps, in a way. They’re bits of melody and tunings and certain intervals that I’m playing around with.”

Other times, it’s pure flow, into non-musical or non-tonal sound-worlds.

“It’s hard to predict what I’m going to do,” Carter says. “A lot of times, my ideal is to get into a space where my fingers are going places I don’t really expect them to. Hopefully I can steer that out into something that still makes sense.”

TOM CARTER performs at Lyric Hall in New Haven on June 1 at 8 p.m., with Spray Paint, Shinnirs and Landing. Tickets are $8. Lyrichallnewhaven.com.