Charlie McAlister

Charlie McAlister is a visual artist and musician from South Carolina who began releasing art-splattered banjo songs and found-sound collages in the late '80s. By the mid-'90s he had countless cassette-only releases to his name, many issued by his own Flannel Banjo label, but many more released on hopelessly obscure and short-lived tape-only labels.

Like his spiritual brothers Daniel Johnston and Jad Fair, McAlister is a pop songwriter at heart. Despite the clatter and noise — and not to mention the overall inaccessibility and unavailability of many of his releases — his melodies are strong, catchy, and very often beautiful. He speak-sings in a trailer-trash tenor that perfectly suits his typical subject matter, which is, generally speaking, Southern dread, suburban hopelessness, and plain old love and death. His albums are very often interspersed with such sonic detritus as field recordings, random conversations, snippets of instructional records, speeches, industrial noise, etc. Combined with the often handmade packaging, McAlister's recordings become refreshing objects of folk sound art rather than mere collections of songs (by the way, you still can't download a hand-screened or individually drawn cover).

A pinnacle of sorts came in 1997 when Catsup Plate released Mississippi Luau, a loose concept album about (as you might guess) Hawaiian culture in the South. The album featured some of McAlister's most focused songwriting, while retaining his characteristic weirdness. In 2003 Catsup Plate released Death Water Estates, a compilation drawn from four extremely limited cassettes that were originally released in 1994. But these collections are only two of the more readily available releases in McAlister's kudzu-sprawl of a discography.