Richard Chartier has worked alone and in collaborations with the likes of William Basinski, his recordings very often barely scraping to reach the threshold of the audible. Here, he invited Asmus Tietchens to rework his 1998 Postfabricated, always intended as an ‘open’ work, in which a number of other artists were involved. Chartier and Tietchens then further reworked the results, marking this in effect a collaboration, in which it is hard to make out who has brought what to the mix. No matter: although silence at times threatens to overwhelm the 51 minute title track, it is utterly intriguing, every wispy, ten miles high cirrus detail prompting you to crane your neck. And, despite the actual sound of aircraft passing overheard mixing inadvertently into the piece as you listen to it, its angles, contours and suggestions are such as to give the lie to certain forms of electronic ‘minimalism’ merely involving minimal content. A second CD, entitledPrefabrication, features shorter, marginally busier excerpts from the project.
—The Wire, UK
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This collaboration between legendary German experimental musician Asmus Tietchens and young American sound artist Richard Chartier has its roots in the 2005 remix CD Re’Post’Postfabricated, where Tietchens was one of an international all-star cast of artists who reworked an early ambient release by Chartier. And for the two of them, the remix process turned out to be open-ended, as they continued to exchange sound files and ideas. The result is this long, dark, atmospheric piece that unfolds and evolves at a glacial pace, with a gentle, elemental ebb and flow; heaven, as usual with these artists, lies in the details. Given how whisper-quiet this disc is, you’ll need to turn up the volume to reveal the sculpted sonic pinpricks, the uncanny rhythmic crackles, and Tietchens’s distinctive analog synth motifs. But it’s worth every ounce of effort.
—The Phoenix, US
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There was a time that the word ‘remix’ was not in vogue, but it was called ‘re-working’ or ‘recycling’. Asmus Tietchens comes from that time, so he would have probably referred to his remix of Chartier for Re’Post’Fabricated (see Vital Weekly 489) as a rework. It was also the start of a further work with Richard Chartier, which is now released as Fabrication. Material was sent back and forth until it was finished. The material Tietchens initially sent to Chartier is also enclosed, with the first 500 copies, on a CD called Pre-Fabrication. That is nice since it’s a rare occasion that we get a glimpse of the work of Tietchens in this. The eleven pieces show a minimal pattern. Just a few sounds are running in each piece, but with various inside the piece throughout the time span. Clicks, rhythms, glissando, and oscillations. The interesting thing is that the material is quite audible, which is a great contrast with the final result of Fabrication. It’s great to get a look in the kitchen of Tietchens. What happened en route we learn on the final result of Fabrication, which is just one piece that is some fifty minutes long. Here we have to turn up the volume quite a bit, to unfold it’s beauty. It’s hard to figure out what has happened with the original Tietchens sounds, but I’m sure it’s there. The material is again slow, but also soft, and only with the volume a bit louder, things start to work. Fabrication moves through certain phases – or maybe even tracks if you want – but not with a real beginning or ending. Things blend into eachother and as the CD progresses it becomes even softer. No doubt there is a lot of Chartier influences here – the softness, the one piece approach – but the trained listener will certainly recognize the Tietchens influence, certainly if you keep his Menge works in mind. Though the surprise of this collaboration is that perhaps not as a big as both boys deliver a great job as expected, and it’s indeed all very much a long the lines of microsound, this is a fine work.
—Vital Weekly, Netherlands
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A cross-generational collaboration between these two giants of the world of esoteric sound manifests itself exactly as would be imagined, and for the listener who is willing to give it the close attention it requires, there are great rewards.
Beginning as an open collaboration project by Chartier to work with other artists in manipulating is Postfabricated album for its reissue in 2003, Tietchens continued to work with this source material and eventually approached Chartier to work together on it as a formal collaboration, hence this single, 51 minute piece, Fabrication. In addition to the album, Die Stadt has seen fit to include Prefabrication, a second disc of the full material Tietchens reworked for the originalPostfabrication project as well, which is similar in approach, but stands alone.
The piece opens, unsurprisingly, in near silence. Eventually subtle swells of glacial tones being to appear faintly in the mix, then ringing chimes and what could almost be a cello somewhere off in the distance. The austerity of the work makes for some interesting side effects: As I am writing this review now and listening yet again in a moderately busy cafe, I am catching myself rewinding the track to see if that was a little bit I had missed before, or just someone’s cell phone a few tables over. I’m batting about .500 on that, so it is an interesting effect to say the least.
“Drift” would be an excellent single word summation of this work, because there’s a sense of sounds just floating in a vacuum on their own inertia, something simple that continues on and on with subtle variation. Once in awhile a more recognizable sound rears its head, a buried digital click, glitch sounds that could be crickets or part of a field recording of a different universe.
The 11 tracks that make up Prefabrication are more in line with Richard Chartier’s solo work than the strict minimalism of Fabrication. Throughout the pieces a sense of traditional rhythm is frequently found, but painted from a pallet of quiet clicks, skipping CDs, and data errors. Most normal people would not be able to dance to it, but the patterns are obvious and clear. The non-rhythmic tracks also have their own character as well, the digital water-fall sensations of the fourth track, and the shrill, tinnitus inflicting tones fo the ninth track stand out especially.
No one would expect this sort of collaboration to have a major crossover appeal, and I doubt either artist had such motivations in their heads when they began to work on this collaboration. But regardless of that, Tietchens and Chartier have made another wonderfully complex electronic work that is sure to be a high point in both of their discographies for a while to come.
—brainwashed.com
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Much of Richard Chartier’s work veers away from furtive sallies of chronological succession and concerns itself with a night of spaceless time. Featherlight skeins of sound and condensed clusters of static-stained high frequency tones act as though no longer oriented by the pull of Earth’s gravity, and shorn of the mandate to dutifully maintain the balancing act of universal attraction, they play distorted patterns on the sensorial keyboard. Chartier and Tietchens come together on this project owing to the fruitful Re-Post-Fabricated series, a work born much like a geranium, that is, by Tietchens taking cuttings from Chartier’s previous work. Venturing further along the path mapped out with recent works such as Incidence and Current, the spartan reductivism stands further in the distance, yet remains plainly visible, with dense tonal washes and complex though delicately nuanced chasms looming large. Without beginning or end, these drone-pieces emanate from all sides and permeate the entire soundfield. In their outwardgoingness, these discreet movements are highly amplified, creating intensely present moments that, asides from entailing a transmutation of depth of field, drain the shrill, sibilant tones and felicitous almost-sounds of all their color, not unlike a gyroscope which goes entirely gray when it is spun fast. Although Tietchens seems to haunt rather than directly partake in the shaping of these works, his contributions, in the form of looping glissandi-swooping and general testing of the music’s periphery, does allow compositions to gain in succour through the heightened gestural sensitivity. Many instances seem purely sepia-tinted, yet the complex and intuitive swathes of cosmic dust shift the location of the sound dramatically up and down, encouraging concentration on the pitches and colors. When the atmosphere establishes itself, there is an almost bewildering range and an ear-tingling, brain-delighting patchwork of sounds needling their way through the slow motion current of gray.
—ei-mag.com
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Our perception of music is similar to that of history: Short events produce short cycles, long events produce long cycles. This simple mnemonic explains, why the stone age took approximately 5,5 million years (developping tools from scratch was the hardest part) and why the computer age keeps speeding up relentlessly: (there are uncountable parallel lines of development all interacting with each other). Transferred to the world of the arts, we’d expect a long track like Fabrication to be composed of sustained tones, naturally stretching the fabric of time to its limits. Quite opposed to this anticipation, however, it is a miraculously mushrooming microcosm of structures usually inaudible to the human ear. Consider putting your headphones on before listening to it as the equivalent to using a scanning electron micrograph for watching atoms.
In a way, the route Asmus Tietchens and Richard Chartier have taken on this album could be compared as the direct inversion of the approach chosen by artists such as Jason Kahn. While Kahn abruptly ended his potentially infinite dronescapes after a mere four to five minutes on “Sihl”, for example, the duo extends their collaborational miniature events into an endless ocean of microsound ripple movements. Drones are still part of the equation, opening up the piece and virtually laying a foundation for the introduction of the themes. But after the organisms underneath have started growing like fungi on a fertile ground, they are reduced to the status of a fluid, which merely carries the musical events from one place in time to the next.
The real center of the work are gently manipulated digital cuts, samples so short they carry no inborn associations besides, maybe, with the world of insects: Bass-heavy beetle-buzzes, crackling cicada-cries, the fine but distinct rustling of chitin shells. Tietchens and Chartier keep their material sparse and minimal, the arrangements are never stuffed with too many details, but rather filled with just as many elements as the ear can process at a time. Much more than satisfying their sound fetishism, they work out the relationships between the events, allowing them to swing sympathetically in rhythm-like symbioses or create a second stream, which moves independently from the limelight and feeds the system with crackles and static noise. Even though “Fabrication” flows effortlessly and seems to have been painted with the same colours, returning to a fixed set of timbres and effects with each sweep, it manages to create the strong and irrepressable sensation that it is composed of many different scenes, each with a unique flavour and a different set of preconditions.
This is then, the most remarkable fact about the disc: Rather than an experiment with alien results, it sounds perfectly natural and quite warm. It is only after you force yourself to rationally think about what Tietchens and Chartier are doing here, that the radicality of their work becomes apparent. Getting back to the microscope-comparison, they are deeply surveying the micro-landscape in front of their eyes, drifting without necessity but with a firm hand. It doesn’t take long for this approach to substitute the reality around you with the one contained in the petri dish. If there is anything to learn from that, it is not that the mnemonic about long and short cycles has suddenly become obsolete. Instead, we have to see things in context: In a small enough world, even the shortest events can turn into epics.
—tokafi.com
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Fabrication ist die Vertiefung einer zunŠchst eher beilŠufigen Kollaboration von Asmus Tietchens und Richard Chartier. Diesen Gedanken von Vertiefung oder auch Fokussierung kann man geradezu spuren, denn Fabrication ist ein regelrechter Koloss, der sich selbst gut 50 Minuten lang eine dauerhafte Entfaltung gewŠhrt, die vom Anbahnen gleichermassen lebt wie von einer niemals aprupten Episodenhaftigkeit. Als Zusammenarbeit ist dieses Album nicht weniger bemerkenswert als Chartiers viel gepriesenes Projekt mit William Basinski von 2004. Denn auch mit Tietchens ist es ihm gelungen, die Persšnlichkeiten hinter dieser Musik in ein Scheinwerferlicht zu tauchen, das zwar Deutlichkeit gestattet, aber immer auch etwas Neuartiges beleuchtet, das keineswegs an ein pures Hin und Her – denn so begann diese Arbeit schlie§lich wohl – erinnert, sondern vielmehr an ein schlussiges Ineinandergreifen. Ein sehr umtriebiges, rastloses Album.
—spex, Germany
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Tietchens has such a conceptual mastery over his material that his collaborations risk a lack of solvency. Fabrication is a difficult project, as Richard Chartier brings an equally singular personality to the proceedings that, unlike his collaborations with Taylor Deupree and William Basinski, doesn’t initially appear to be completely congruous with the more Sturm und Drang elements of Tietchens. Also extremely prolific, Chartier’s work consistently frustrates, in that his lengthy excursions are predicated upon absence. The albums are the slow fade, the songs heard through the wall, and while he often reaches the sublime, such efforts can collapse into a joyless stasis. Patience is key.
Fabrication is the continuation of a 2003 project called Re’Post’Postfabricated, in which Chartier invited artists such as COH, Matmos, Byetone and Tietchens to rework his 1998 CD Postfabricated using sound files he distributed. Further collaboration ensued, and the result is a satisfying 51-minute bridging of personalities. As might be expected, Tietchens’ more dynamic scrapes and blips are for the most part severely muted by Chartier’s deliberate approach, but rather than frustrate, Fabrication invites the listener to discern what exactly appeals about their individual works. Though new territory isn’t really explored, Tietchens and Chartier’s generous attenuation to each other helps Fabrication avoid discordance.
—dustedmagazine.com
