This 21-minute live set, recorded by Cascone, Chartier and Deupree in Montreal in April 2001, is beautifully sculpted, elegant and spacious – and nowhere near as “minimal” as some of their recent work. Indeed, there’s a lot of activity going on, but the musicians shuffle elements around from foreground to background with consummate skill and studiously avoid the in-yer-face rips and snarls of Mego-style electronica. It’s classy stuff, and yields much when subsequently “reconstructed” (about time we dispensed with the word “remix” for good) by each artist in turn. Cascone’s Max/MSP software on “New World Rising (New Density Mix)” squeezes the final few minutes of the music through its own cracks to produce a compact, pulsing four and a half minutes, while Chartier’s “Afterimage” distills its essence down to static drones punctuated by tiny bell sounds and frosty panning clicks. On “4+2_stil live” Deupree’s loops crunch out a locked groove backbeat over which layers of gritty algorithmic crickets settle – things get alarmingly funky after about six minutes, but just when you finally expect the thumping 110bpm bass, Deupree pulls out the clicks and crackles and leaves you with the clouds. Accomplished and entertaining, if not as captivating as the three preceding tracks
—Paris Transatlantic, France
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An interesting experiment, After arose from the residue of a laptop jam between Kim Cascone, Richard Chartier, and Taylor Deupree last spring at Montreal’s Micro_Mutek event. Titled “Cascone + Chartier + Deupree,” the piece moves through perhaps five moods in twenty minutes, showcasing Cascone’s abrasive static tendencies, Chartier’s obsession with near-inaudible bass and crystalline sound flashes, and Deupree’s love of loops and sinewaves. to round out the release, each contributor used material from the improvisation to fashion their own through-pieces: Cascone’s “new world rising (new density mix)” is tone-signal beeping and metallic static from the end of the original; Chartier’s “afterimage” is textured but quiet bass and glints; and Deupree’s “4+2_Stil” develops significant tone structures that add depth to the original concept. All in all, After is an intruiging compositional study.
—XLR8R, US
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Kim Cascone, Richard Chartier and Taylor Deupree on one night must be for the laptop freaks a dream becomes true. If they end up playing (improvising) together, I assume a wet dream becomes true. They did it last year at a small festival Micro Mutek in Montreal. They wouldn’t be good laptoppers, if they didn’t decide to rework the material by each one afterwards. So we get here the full improv concert, followed by three smaller re-creations. The joint concert goes from using the sound of matrix printers to a densely layered rhythm piece (almost Pan Sonic/Goem inspired) and in the second half some sort of sound processing for electro magnetic sounds… It seems that Richard Chartier does the exact opposite. His near silent piece doesn’t seem to use any sound from the improv at all, but I’m sure that’s all aural illusion. From all the silent people I know, Chartier is one of the better. His sound may not be there, but for sure it is there.
—Vital Weekly, The Netherlands
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Taylor Deupree’s increasingly influential and significant 12K imprint has gained international attention among laptop and improvisational electronic musicians. This startling record brings together Deupree’s colleague and frequent collaborator Richard Chartier and stellar artist Kim Cascone, whose music and writing are, in effect, ground zero for the improv laptop scene. This collaboration sees the three playing live at the Micro_Mutek 2 festival in 2001 on the opening track, which spans more than 21 minutes. The talent evident here is the turning away from the simplicities of the all too common DSP techniques used by so many laptoppers. Instead, the threesome opts for more architectonic movements, as subtle and quiet as the movement of glaciers.
—othermusic.com
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After was recorded on the occasion of Micro_Mutek 2, an event in MontrŽal organized by the curators of the annual Mutek festival of new electronic music. At the end of their respective solo sets, laptop sound artists Kim Cascone, Richard Chartier and Taylor Deupree decided to perform together for a final improvisational set to conclude the night’s activities. This live set is the first track presented here, which is then followed by three shorter reconstructions of that material by the three respective performers. The original live piece, as one might expect, goes through a series of stages, from resonating tones and sparse surface crackles to more rhythmical sections and a dense layering of seemingly incongruous sounds. More revealing, and perhaps even more interesting than the original performance, however, are the three reworkings which follow it… Rather than compressing the sounds and layering them… Richard Chartier turns his mix into an exercise of subtraction and reduction, with all the subtleties, deep bass frequencies and near silences we have come to expect from his work… One of the nice things about this release is that each of the remixes reflect an original approach to laptop/microsound composition, evidence surely that this “genre” is by no means one-dimensional or static, but rather is living and breathing with new ideas that are nowhere near running out.
—Incursion, US
