Richard Chartier has carved out a reputation as one of digital electronic music’s most uncompromising minimalists, helping define the microsound aesthetic with landmark albums like Series, Decisive Forms and Of Surfaces released on influential labels such as Bernhard Gunter’s Trente Oiseaux and Chartier’s own Line imprint. A Field For Mixing finds Chartier on top form, releasing what’s probably his best album for some time. Given the extreme lowercase dynamics of his defining works A field For Mixing seems relatively accommodating. You’ll still have to crank the volume and listen attentively, but on these two long-form pieces Chartier uses concrete sound as his starting point – immediately making for a wider bandwidth than the extreme high frequency electronic signals that dominated his turn of the century output. ‘Fields For Recording 1-8’ is a near-fifty minute composition created from “processed field recordings of small and large, open and enclosed spaces” spread across various locations across North America, Europe, Japan and Australia. Far from being some sort of travelogue this piece has the feel of a very unified whole, taking the form of a fluid narrative that reveals the subtle sonic signatures held by a host of different locations. This is all done without the usual trappings associated with field recording and ambient music; preliminary listens indicate a blissful absence of birdsong or the ornamental trickle of mountain streams. Chartier seems far more interested in the subtler properties of a space, and for much of this piece you’re listening to the particular resonances of a room and the air held within. There’s something eerily transportive about the environmental static of ‘Fields For Recording 1-8’, and despite the hushed understatement of it all there’s certainly more depth and intrigue here than in a good many of the more conventional drone or ambient recordings you’ll hear doing the rounds. Both pieces here carry carry dedications to Chartier’s peers and colleagues, the first to the grossly underrated Steve Roden and the second to William Basinski. The considerably shorter twenty-two minute work ‘A Desk For Mixing’ was in an an earlier incarnation the starting point for ‘Untitled 3’, a collaboration between Chartier and Basinski. There’s a slightly more processed and sculpted feel to this piece, with silvery strands of electronic signals reaching out through the quiet, cloudy greyness that makes up the bulk of the material. As with its longer companion this is all of an extremely high standard, completing a release that shouldn’t be missed by anyone favourably disposed towards the more extreme end of minimal electronics.
—Boomkat, UK
+
Richard Chartier’s practice rests not in music but in the charting of urban sonic space. Using high-definition microphones and various effects, the American sound artist records, layers and subtly treats aural data that otherwise rests on the precipice of perception. Indeed, Chartier’s unusual art could be considered in terms of the sound of silence—minimalist and reductionist to a point where we are engaging wholly with the acoustic qualities and peripheries of specific architecture and space. While it requires a patient, headphone-only listen, new work A Field for Mixing is an incredibly engaging and realised document, given half a chance. Recorded in Australia, Japan and the US, the 50-minute piece gradually draws you deeper into its layers of texture and tone, with Chartier slowly adding and withdrawing fields of sound. The details of the various environments become increasingly striking the further the record plays out, immersing and consuming lovely anecdotal moments—distant voices, traffic and birdsong—before allowing them back up for air.
—The Age, AU
+
Richard Chartier’s A Field For Mixing is a release that continues this artist’s apparent penchant for creating lengthy ultra-quiet and wispy grey field recordings that barely exist on the edge of everyone’s hearing. The two long pieces here pay homage to his friends and collaborators Steve Roden and William Basinski, namechecks which may help orient the listener as they attempt to navigate through these misty stretches of nothingness. The first (48 minute) piece was assembled from field recordings made in America, Europe, Japan and Australia. It always puzzles me how it is possible to find such near-desolate stillness and zones of supreme silence in our bustling and overcrowded globe. Perhaps we should find some solace in that fact, as we nurse our fears of global warming and overpopulation.
—thesoundprojector.com
+
‘Austere Headphonics’, would be a somewhat-tongue-in-cheek-summation of Richard Chartier’s Room40 release, A Field for Mixing. The two pieces contained within are dedicated to arch-minimalists Steve Roden and William Basinski respectively. Richard Chartier draws inspiration from these two explorers of hidden and unheard space, as well as others; Thomas Koner and Alvin Lucier come to mind. Clocking in at decidedly un-austere fifty minutes, “Fields for Recording 1 – 8” unveils its spacious majesty slowly. Similar in process to a montage from an album of holiday snapshots to locales such as the Alaskan Tundra, the Russian Taiga, the Mariana Trench and the Strezleki Desert, Chartier’s field recordings from Australia, Japan and North America are blurred into an engaging audio journey undertaken without moving. Scraping, bowed metallic sounds merge into rumbling bass, birdsong, palimpsests of acoustic space, sparkling chimes and human voices as the piece unfolds. Many composers would imbue such source material with an aura of creeping dread, but Chartier hints at the contemplative truth at the heart of the world, without coming across all tie-dyed and New Age. Second piece, “A Desk for Mixing” is based upon a site-specific instillation that took place at the Montalvo Arts Centre in Saratoga, California in 2006. Summoning the spirit of Basinski, A Desk for Mixing moves forward and retreats in a submerged fashion, similar to the gentle pulse of the tide on a still, moonlit night. Crackles of static creep into the audio field, as the recently inundated sand strains to expel the dark mystery of the deep.
—cyclicdefrost.com
+
The dedicatees of this pair of gorgeous soundscapes by Richard Chartier are, respectively, Steve Roden and William Basinski. Regarding the latter, the magnificently scary ebb and flow of the indeterminate cavernous resonance characterizing “A Desk For Mixing” is defined by its originator as “the starting point for the collaborative work ‘Untitled 3′”: between the two. It is an awe-inspiring, utterly splendid track, simplicity and profoundness fused in thought-stopping suspension. On the contrary, the 47-minute “Fields for Recording 1-8” – the title a gentle irony on the origin of the piece, whose source are processed location echoes born during travels across several continents – is one of those episodes causing us to put a question mark of sorts on Chartier’s deserved reputation as a man working at the margins of audible. In fact, it is not the first time in which this writer experiments with seriously increased volume while listening to his creations, thus enjoying an outcome that is probably at the opposite end of what the artist had initially envisioned. By giving the proper attention to the original materials and the method with which the composer deploys them, the musicality of contemporary life is exalted, the listener inclined to forget the crudeness of people’s feelings and the heavy consequence of extreme metropolitan lifestyles. Chartier manages to filter the pessimism out, channelling the resounding features of certain environments into masses of frequencies that result both ethereal and concrete, finding a poetry of sorts in what started as a cold manifestation of hypothetical evolution. Occasionally the focus is shifted on the animal side
. A barking dog appears camouflaged amidst the urban din, whereas magnificent exotic birds make their presence fundamental in a section. Still, we’re not in front of a sheer collection of aural snapshots, which may be more or less successful but essentially means nothing. A Field For Mixing is a specialist stimulation of the emotional response that aware individuals feel when confronted with the altered order of familiar factors.
—braindeadeternity.blogspot.com
+
Anyone interested in the full potential of music and sound can tell you that the everyday noises, which most people ignore, contain many elements that are quite musical when you focus on their inherent rhythms and repetitions. In this mindset, it’s easy to imagine that simple things like the rumbling of an air conditioning system or the papery crackle of fall leaves contain their own type of music. Super-minimalist composer Richard Chartier seems to understand this phenomenon especially well and channels it into the two epic tracks on A Field for Mixing. By organizing and rearranging minuscule found sounds and fashioning some new bits of his own, Chartier manages to create pieces that are incredible both for their understatement and their beauty. “Fields for Recording 1-8” is the first track and consists of nearly fifty minutes worth of field recordings from across the globe. Chartier crafts them into an odd sort of sonic journey spanning everything from industrial settings to pastoral landscapes. Bird songs, barking dogs, footsteps, mechanical clanking and humming, gusting wind, wind chimes, and a range of other sounds all contribute to the gentle hum of this piece. With Chartier’s expert touch, the sum of these elements is so gentle and serene that it gives the sensation of experiencing the world through some sort of aural fog in which everything is recognizable, yet simultaneously distant and mysterious. “A Desk for Mixing,” the second and final track, dispenses with the field recordings, yet still inhabits the same minimalist territory. This piece features a soft, rising and falling sound loop consisting of a few chords with light electronic buzzes filling the space between each cresting wave. While the source material for this is much less natural than “Fields,” there is still the distinct impression that Chartier is creating his own kinds of natural background noises in the studio, possibly inspired what he has experienced in his own life. Ultimately, he is successful in this, as the same sense of understated serenity found in the previous track defines this piece. The most amazing aspect of “A Field for Mixing” is the way in which the music is enhanced by the listener’s location. Even with a solid pair of headphones, the minimal nature of the music allows the background sounds of your own life begin to creep into the mix and become as much a part of the composition as what Chartier has created. In this way, the music constantly evolves depending on where and when it is heard, making each experience seem fresh and unique. With his stunning compositions, Chartier helps us to open our ears and find the hidden music in our own lives and for that, he should be applauded. 8/10
—foxydigitalis.com
+
After activating the player, all you hear in the room – a place dedicated to listening – is the laptop fan and some noise coming from the road, and no sound from the speakers. Four minutes pass before you begin to hear something in the background. A carpet of sound slowly creeps in; dilated and ethereal. A Field For Mixing by Richard Chartier, indulges in microsound intransigence, connecting with the more extreme and purist minimalism, one that identifies silence as an essential condition of sound. This hypothesis (seen from John Cage onwards) has been tinged with abstract and conceptual experimental traits that have created a real aesthetic, philosophical and linguistic revolution. Nowadays it takes on other meanings – of course – to still experience the void in music: it forces us to “theoretical” positions and to environments close to the “fuzzy” sets that are no longer opposed in a logic of fullnesses and voids, but balanced, on the contrary – as in this case – in a continuum of drones and auditory forms, artfully made metamorphic, indistinct and neutral.
—neural.it
+
Múltiples campos para el silencio audible. Así se puede definir lo que el norteamericano Richard Chartier ha realizado a lo largo de más de una década. Sus discos abordan el sonido desde una perspectiva diferente, al límite más bajo de lo que podemos oír, siempre jugando con la percepción del espacio y como se puede moldear con esta no-música. “A Field For Mixing” es el más reciente de sus trabajos, y no es una excepción a esa concepción y a esa búsqueda del ruido que apenas lo es.
Apenas dos cortes tiene este álbum largo –lo edita, Room40, el segundo para esa marca luego de “Current” (2006)–, ambos dedicados a otros dos músicos que también se mueven en la electrónica más próxima al minimalismo. “Fields For Recording 1-8”, el primer track, una suerte de continuación de su disco “A Field For Recording. 1” (3particles, 2005), está dedicado a Steve Roden, un viejo colaborador de Chartier, y es una pieza de casi cincuenta minutos de duración, construida a partir de field recordings registradas en ‘una variedad de pequeños y grandes, abiertos y cerrados espacios’ en lugares como Australia, Japón, Estados Unidos y Europa. Una forma de desplegar ambient a lo largo de extensas capas de grabaciones de campo, que develan superficies rodeadas de vacíos. Voces en la distancia, maquinarias, ondas que atraviesan el aire, el simple viento, extensiones de que se convierten en eventuales pistas de sonido sin instrumento alguno. Campos de ruido esparcidos en las más diversas locaciones que hacen que el calificativo de músico minimalista tenga pleno sentido. “A Desk For Mixing”, el track dos, es otra pieza larga, pero menor que la anterior: veintidós minutos con dedicatoria esta vez para William Basinski. Basada en la instalación llamada ‘Mixing Desk’, comisionada por el festival Bleeding Edge y presentada en el Montalvo Arts Center en Saratoga, California en 2006, la pieza es ‘el punto de arranque para el trabajo colaborativo ‘Untitled 3’’. Ese era precisamente uno de los tracks añadidos a la reedición de “Untitled” (Spekk, 2004), luego titulada “Untitled 1-3” (Line, 2008), su disco junto al arquitecto de las cintas derruidas, Basinski. Con él comparten no solo un álbum, sino un interés por el ruido estático y las pistas que se repiten hasta que no quede rastro de su marca inicial. La mesa para la mezcla es una fría masa de frecuencias bajas –algunas ni siquiera se sienten– que se suceden una y otra vez, continuamente hasta que se forma una masa densa y espesa de ambientes calmos y serenos, pese a cierta turbiedad que se respira.
En Room40 tienen razón al decir que la estética de Chartier es una estética monocromática, y en este trabajo podríamos decir que “Fields For Recordings 1-8” es de un solo color, el gris, y “A Desk For Mixing” tiende a hacerse más claro, de un blanco inmaculado. Es entre esos tonos del rango cromático el lugar en donde se mueve este músico. Y escondido en los sonidos más ocultos es donde se encuentra “A Field For Mixing”.
—hawai.wordpress.com
