LINE label head Richard Chartier explores the innermost recesses of silence across three long tracks of hard-drive hum and hiss. While you’ll need a good soundsystem to properly hear the nothingness, Chartier’s vision of dusted absence is well worth a closer listen.
—philip sherburne, emusic.com
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The most recent Richard Chartier release prior to this was called Decisive Forms, a seemingly ironic title given its incredibly slight, barely audible low-end nature. compared with this new record, though, its predecessor seems both decisive and very well formed. Of Surfaces is just about the single most minimal recording i have ever heard outside John cage’s 4.33, tiny slivers of muted noise intended to simulate the notion of sound transmitted through “surfaces” (walls, microphones, windows, etc.). This is then supposed to pose questions about the act of listening – i.e. how “pure” can any transmission of sound really be, and how is a “real” experience of ten distorted or fabricated through the “surface” of the performer. It’s the kind of record that is really open to interpretation. The bulk of the record is taken up by a 26-minute piece consisting of blunted swells of sub-bass and a tiny crackle that slowly reduces itself into nothingness so that it becomes unclear whether anything was ever there or not. You start to think that maybe it was just a microphone inadvertently left on in an empty room. There is then a “variation” on that track, sounding not dissimilar to the original. Is it really a variation, or just a continuation? And was it ever there in the first place? You get the idea. Anyone unwilling to engage with the terms of Of Surfaces should steer clear, because it requires considerable input from the listener, even simply to distinguish the sounds. Not the sort of thing anyone would spend the whole day listening to, but it holds a much greater weight than its tiny audio range would otherwise suggest.
—Grooves, US
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Line label boss Richard Chartier releases his new micro textured CD for the less is more crowd. A reduced soundscape best listened to through headphones or at low volumes in a spacious room allowing movement to alter the ears perception of the subtle sound range flickering and drifting low and high frequencies. Alongside Bernhard Gunter, Richard Chartier is the leader of the silence is golden brigade. Superb.
—boomkat.com
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The title piece is the longest here, with a lot of silence, and also some occassional sound. If you move through your room, you will notice some very low bass frequencies. Spacious spatial music. It seems as not much is going on, but again… this is just an aural illusion. Chartier works with extreme frequencies, either very high, or very low. These are collaged in a very clever, using stereo a lot. Definitly not easy music to access and one that will hand it’s beauty only to those willing to concentrate on close hearing. Unlike so many ambient (= environment, space) music, a difficult but a most rewarding work.
—Vital Weekly, The Netherlands
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Of Surfaces offers three comparably minimal compositions. The title piece throbs and pulses gently between the stereo channels, subject once again to abrupt cuts. “Variance” purrs, sizzles then rises to a quiet judder. “Composition” hums then enacts a low-key drama : busy, almost cluttered by Chartier’s standards. Headphone and closed eyes help to meet his demands and to disclose rewards.
—The Wire, UK
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Richard Chartier’s latest release on LINE picks up from a middle ground of where his previous releases left off: most notably the much celebrated Series (LINE, 2000) and decisive forms (trente oiseaux, 2001). The disc features three long pieces; the title piece is followed by a “variance”, which is in turn followed by a shorter work, simply titled “composition”. When listened to on loudspeakers, the natural room tones seem to soak up a lot of the sounds in these pieces, and the impression is that there is more silence in this work than sound. Listening to it in headphones, a completely different world opens up where sounds, however subtle and faint, occupy so much of the sound “surfaces” that you wonder if there’s any silence at all in this work. The terms commonly used to describe works in the lowercase “genre” (bass frequencies, crackles, static , clicks…) don’t seem to do this work justice, although all of the constituent elements are certainly present. Taking full advantage of the stereo spectrum, not to mention a complete range of frequencies (of which extremely low frequencies are clearly favored), Chartier’s work seems both organic and artificial, pulling you into its near-silences and demanding your undivided attention. It is a world I’m most willingly drawn into. His most accomplished project to date, of surfaces is a work of astonishing subtlety and sensitivity. The spaces between silence and sound have never seemed so immediate, so vast, so incomprehensible as this.
—incursion.org
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All you hear on the 26-odd minutes that comprise the title track of Of Surfaces is silence, a faint, slowly-building, warbling tone (very low, very deep). The tone creeps up and gets louder at certain moments, and then recedes into silence at other moments. There is no uniformity here–the creeping and receding follow no consistent pattern. In fact, the lack of pattern here is what makes a track like this interesting, as, if you knew what to expect, you probably wouldn’t listen as carefully during the silent patches. But those patches are generally brief, and the silence is continually broken up with the faintest hint of a tone, followed by a more persistent and stronger tone. Every now and then, on the title track and especially on final track, “Composition,” there will be an intercession of noise–real, certifiable sound that emerges from the background hum, blasts out (or softly sputters out), and then disappears back into the force of the silence or of the propulsive hum. In some ways, when I listen to this disk, I hold on, waiting for those moments, for, when they arrive, they’re as unexpected and as exhilarating as the thousands of aberrant noises you hear on most other electronic disks… I find his music perfectly suited to quiet settings, when I’m writing or reading or just daydreaming. This is not music for everyone, but those tired of the same, old, repetitive electronic disks that are reviewed here and elsewhere might want to give Chartier a listen… and, while there’s a definite similarity in his work, Of Surfaces, for some reason, resonates more strongly in my mind than some of his previous work, and, for that reason, I’d recommend this disk to anyone who might want to take a strange walk on the “silent” side.
—Stylus Magazine, US
