Richard Chartier albums tend to sit quietly gathering dust on the shelves here until an opportunity appropriate to serious listening presents itself, invariably late at night or very early in the morning, always through headphones, always in darkness. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Chartier album in daylight. It’s a music of forms and shapes barely perceived and barely perceptible, a fantastic journey into a realm of shadow where sounds – as opposed to musical “ideas”, a terms that seems to imply identifiable parameters (pitch, rhythm..) which are of little importance to Chartier, appear and disappear almost without being noticed. As Will Montgomery writes in his fine essay on Chartier in Blocks of Consciousness and the Unbroken Continuum, this is music that “pulls the ears toward its own disappearance.” But that shouldn’t be taken to mean it’s depressing, even nihilistic stuff. Chartier’s canvas is never empty; silence might be implied, as something from which sounds emerge and to which they return, but it’s never used as a compositional element. We’re not talking Wandelweiser aesthetic here. There’s always something going on, often at the extremes of the audible spectrum – and Current is one of Chartier’s richest offerings to date in terms of activity level – from fluttery sub-bass to gently muffled clicks, tiny rips, rasps and puffs of sound sprinkled into the ear. As if that dust that settled on the box while the disc was patiently waiting its turn has somehow found its way into the music itself.
—Paris Transatlantic, France
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Almost no label that purports to be presenting “minimalist” works is without the ever present output of Richard Chartier. His name, like Bernhard Gunther before him, became synonymous with a certain brand of minimalism. Since the re-release a few years back of his early works,Other Materials and Direct.Incidental.Consequential. Chartier’s profile has reached near stratospheric levels. His work, (virtually in parallel to Bernhard Gunther’s) ranges from the near-silent pieces on Series (which really gave life to his recent success), to the more accessibleLevels Inverted installation piece last year.
Of late, he has been perhaps over prolific, basking in the glow of success, underground media darling , and satisfying an audience hungry for his often austere sound installations, constantly touring with boundless energy, and with audio and visual work springing up in every corner of the globe, saturating the scene with a host of recordings for the last two years or so.
It is with no surprise then, that Room 40 recently released Current, a modest 19 minute tonal piece that epitomises Chartier’s more recent sound works, and further adds weight to the label’s impressive roster of luminaries. Typically, Current opens with an agonisingly slow tonal swell, hovering just within the audible spectrum, gently building anticipation. Over the first five minutes, pin spots of sound gradually bloom into audibility, an opening curtain that slowly envelops us with rich, dark reverberating tones, perforated with fractures and swells, and slowly repetitive hypnotic sequences. Gradually the focus becomes sharper, more tactile, and more visceral sounds beging to dominate. It is in the selection of sounds and their inherent precision and quality that Chartier has mastered his craft; this alongside a punishing live schedule, has helped him become one of the most prominent figures in sonic art at the moment.
One gets the impression that this is a true labour of love, and as a self confessed “neat freak”, Chartier’s every sound, every nuance has been thoroughly and lovingly honed and assembled with a surgeon-like hand. If this were a painting, it would be one of Rauschenberg’s Black Paintings, with subtle depths, and mystery in every crevice, a work of clarity, that shifts focus and perspective constantly. Packaged as an Edition in one of Room 40’s understated, utilitarian clamshells, Current is well worth the asking price. This is one of Chartier’s better recent works, but at 19 minutes plus, perhaps a little too short for total immersion.
—white line, UK
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The Australian label Room40 presents an album by Richard Chartier; a transparent CD with a lovely computerized linear design on it. The music is beautiful as well, as can be expected from Richard Chartier, who already released some pearls in the past. A dark, constantly changing undercurrent has been combined with a constant rhythmic ticking. These dense layers of low-end drones do well with the dry, thin click rhythm. Unfortunately, it’s over after about twenty minutes.
—Phosphor Magazine, Netherlands
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Washington based sound artist Richard Chartier offer us a new sound work of 20 minutes which was released late in 2006 on Room40 Australian label run by Lawrence English. Chartier develops in his works low/high frequency range and almost imperceptible sounds. On Current there are digital noises that shape many layers of textures comprising clicks, subtle mechanic percussion, a repetitive sort of clarinet note and dronescapes. The music it’s subtle and deep to alter from silence our perceptions.
—Loop, Chile
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Room40’s Editions series continues in style with a superb 20 minute piece from uber-minimalist Richard Chartier. His pedigree speaks for itself and, to be fair, the samples are never going to do its incredibly subtle tones justice… suffice to say it’s one of his more high-frequency-based works that concentrates on a sense of sensory dislocation and mind-filling sonic overload as well as his trademark quiet textures which are always ever-present in the background. Always understated and coherent, his work is fascinating and explores territiory that others would find too intense. I’m recommending this (as I’m sure you’d expect) but be aware that it could conceivably be regarded as one of his more challenging recent works. Superb though.
—Smallfish, UK
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Another busy bee is Richard Chartier. I am clueless as to how much music he released over the years, and in how many exhibitions he was involved, but ‘countless’ is the right word, I guess. Currently (pun intended) he is moving through australasia, playing concerts in Japan and Australia, and to this end he produced Current, a twenty minute work that is sold on tour (and perhaps also on mailorder). You have to crank up the volume quite a bit, as otherwise you won’t hear much. The idea is that the music is linked to travel by airplane, aircurrents over oceanic currents. It’s a highly atmospheric piece of music that Chartier offers here, with shimmering tones that slowly evolve into a monotonous rhythm. The dense, swamp like sound below is warm but the rhythm part is cold and clinical. Two world colliding together, but in a beautiful way. Highly microsound of course this work, but from somebody like Chartier that is hardly a surprise: he is one of the masters of the genre, and Current is no different.
—Vital Weekly, Netherlands
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Creata in occasione delle performances che Richard Chartier ha tenuto quest’anno in Australia e Giappone, Current una piece di quasi venti minuti legata concettualmente al tema del viaggio in aereoplano attraverso le correnti aeree e al di sopra delle correnti marine. Tema che viene tradotto in un impalpabile pulviscolo elettronico percorso da tessiture ultra-minimali: in un enigmatico stato di perenne sospensione, il flusso sonoro chiamato ad illustrare le correnti celesti e subacque risulta talmente rarefatto che l’idea di movimento appena suggerita dallo stile pointillistico dell’autore.
—Comunicazione Interna, Italy
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Like his friend and occassional collaborator Taylor Deupree, Richard Chartier kneads and massages sound at almost subatomic levels, tinkering invisibly in the fantastical, microscopic province of nanomachines and bacteria. So listening to Current at moderate levels usually reserved for Mastadon, the Mountain Goats, or Beyonce simply won’t do; nor will listening to it in a car, or any other location that prevents you from concentrating on what the music is doing. Under such circumstances, this single 20 minute track registers as little more than a baffling slightly irritating displacement of silence. Isolation and amplification are key here. Chartier starts things off with an impossibly high-frequency sleet-tone, like a battalion of crickets embedded in a twilight wilderness, heard across the country via a friend’s cell phone line. Gradually he introduces then ushers out digital buzzing, skipping effects that bounce from one speaker to another, a hollow clicking pattern, and howling and undulating, bone chilling tones sometimes piling on severeal elements at once and at other times just leaving us with his central sonic theme, which has been slowly growing in intensity while the listener was otherwise preoccupied. Crafty, that.
—Signal to Noise, US
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A un design matérialiste qui lui a valu sa reconnaissance, Richard Chartier en oppose un autre depuis quelque temps ; sonore, celui-la. Sur Current, il expose sur une vingtaine de minutes ses vues en la matire. En l’anti-matire, plus exactement. Par le biais de l’exploration d’un champ sonore aux portes de l’öabstrait, Chartier trouve refuge en vapeurs. Difficile alors de percevoir une direction précise, un exposé musical clair tant il refuse les cadres. Comme ˆ son habitude, le musicien préfre plut t suggérer, et infiltre quelques souffles ou évocations de freinage ˆ sa longue plage minimaliste, convaincu que de petits riens (chocs infimes sur bois, quasi ultrasons) suffiront ˆ divertir l’austérité ambiante. Riens qui lui donnent raison, insinuant au final la forme adéquate ˆ ses prétentions musicales : ambient fantasmant la traversée de fuseaux horaires, invisible et nécessaire autant qu’öeux.
—DMute, France
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A new ep from one of the masters of digital minimalism, microsounds or lowercase, you choose the tag. Current is a 19’50” composition released by the ever excellent Room40 in its series of finely designed quasi-3″ cds, coinciding with Chartier’s 2006 Australia/Japan tour. The track starts with high-end frequencies, soon smudged by white noise, then plunged deep in an ebb and flow of ghost frequencies. All at a very low volume, of course. Described like this, it could sound all too easy, but Chartier does know how to put a careful assemblage and, most of all, an engaging atmosphere in the most anemic sound matter. It’s nothing that you wouldn’t expect from him, but with such a quality production this is surely not a defect.
—www.chaindlk.com
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The exploration in counter-current of the icy territories might lead you to silence, or to the first perception that follows. Recently Richard Chartier used this path. With a very low mix and a minimalist composition, he is forcing an attention that stimulates your ears to an extreme sensibility. Current is the sharp singing of a deep sound in which principle is located in the heart of minuscule cracklings of repetitive tiny sequences (dare we say rhythmic?), far away. If the method reminds you of Francisco Lopez, the form is different; at the peak of his exacerbation of micro sounds, Chartier manages to concentrate the light and to impose its first expression. The song, to which I refer earlier, is not that different from the ones that Alan Lamb created from cables in the desert. Though at the peak of the expression, the difference remains in the volume. Here, everything is microscopic and it seems that the elegiac thread is fragile. It’s a flow of fluid in the absolute of icy cold, of silence, a first violation of inertia. A primordial flow that Chartier intends the poetic restitution, the beginning of everything.
—Fear Drop, France
