BEST OF 2022 “Music For Bending Light And Stopping Time”
—headphonecommute.com
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Richard Chartier’s pioneering queer ambient project puts us under his spell again with an infinitely elegant suite of anaesthetic, spectral tones near guaranteed to grab fans of The Caretaker, Romance, Philip Jeck, Lynch & Badalamenti.
Gently rousing the project from its beauty kip, Chartier’s latest Pinkcourtesyphone dials in 40 minutes of exquisitely supine, pharmaceutically tinted mood music in the wake of 2020’s Leaving Everything To Be Desired. All chiffon pastel hues shrouding something darker in its gauzy middle distance, All Intensive Purposes returns us to rarified realms that have become familiar as a recurrent dream over the decade since we were first smitten by the project’s debut, Foley Folly Folio in 2012 (to the extent we had to reissue it on vinyl the following year on Boomkat Editions). The project has since become a byword for a sense of intrigue, and stuff, amid a contemporary sphere saturated with ambient efforts that rarely come close to the effect of Pinkcourtesyphone’s intoxicating ethers and patient, tactile nuance—save for maybe the likes of Romance & Dean Hurley’s soap opera studies, or the latter stages of The Caretaker.
Enacting a sort of perpetual dusk of the LA mindset, here we find Pinkcourtesyphone’s most succinct snapshots of glamorous, noirish decay. Proffered as “catastrophe muzak”, the sound of sympathy amplified, leaving the room” the imposed stasis of lockdown lingers of proceedings, with a particularly isolated opener ‘that intangible object of contempt / the tenderness of …’ setting a bleakly damaged tone that glacially resolves across the long string sighs of ‘’drained by the very nearness’ and finds its softer, sentimental centre in the fleeting dark bliss of ‘out of an abundance’, and pools into gorgeous, gloaming Lynchian feel of ‘comfortable predictability’ and ‘wistful wishful wanton’, where we can almost hear the medics peering over our prostrate fleshly vessel, searching for a heartbeat behind the shut eyes and blissed expression.
—boomkat.com
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“Everything’s pink in this villa, so it’s called the pink villa,” explains Mrs. Goforth, the dying protagonist of Tennessee Williams’ play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. The color pink has been a conceptual thread and namesake of Richard Chartier’s Pinkcourtesyphone project, dialing up its tenth year with All Intensive Purposes, seven tracks released on Lawrence English’s Room40 label and described succinctly as “catastrophe muzak.” Chartier has spoken about pink as a stressful color, one shown to induce anxiety in viewers rather than comfort. He often uses cinematic references, and one is reminded of Julianne Moore as Carol White in Todd Haynes’s Safe, sitting patiently in her doctor’s office. The walls are painted a strange, medicinal shade of pink. Slowly, we are faced with the horror of her domestic paralysis. She has a wonderful family, the bourgeois dream, yet she can’t shake the intangible feeling: something in the world is wrong.
Like Hypnos dressed in a Chanel suit, Chartier lulls us into dark rooms filled with plastic plants. The opening track, “that intangible object of contempt / the tenderness of…,” conjures a sense of Delia Derbyshire falling, but belongs to a realm of sleep without dream, what David Toop describes as “music in which a blankness prevails.” The title “serving autosuggestion” perfectly captures the empty gaze of an Instagram starlet. Oh, to be pretty and vacant. This is music for adaptor ports, Brian Eno finally slipping into a hairspray coma. Similar to the work of Zoviet France and the Hafler Trio, Chartier can produce an unsettling feeling of floating, alongside subterranean excavation. The language of Pinkcourtesyphone is often ambivalence, a careful balancing act. Throbbing Gristle were fans of Martin Denny, and Pinkcourtesyphone bridges these worlds, playing at the edges of what Toop calls “Tupperware futurism.” A faint hurricane inside the air conditioning, exotica playing through a kitchen wall. The eternal afternoon of a housewife swimming in Librium, sipping pina coladas on the moon. Beneath artificial lights, the cocktail party never ends.
Chartier takes his references and buries them in ghostly chambers of sound. Like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker set in a deserted shopping mall, we swim through boutiques of satin fog. Lauren Bacall fades inside the hotel lobby of Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind. All Intensive Purposes is described as “a new sparkling jewel that already gathers cloudiness in its facets.” Robert Helpmann, as the evil magician Dapertutto in Powell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann, stares into an opaque gem, a fascination of vapors. The ballet students of Dario Argento’s Suspiria huddle in a red-pink hall and listen to the terrible shadows of witches, “We must get rid of that bitch of an American girl. Vanish! She must vanish! Make her disappear!” The track “drained by the very nearness” opens with a line from queer canon Mommie Dearest and taps into the frightening energy of Faye Dunaway’s performance. Her demonic face slathered in cold cream, screaming in her mirrored Brentwood palace. Derek McCormack writes about the chemical decay of film, which eventually turns pink, a subtle queering of the past and memory, beautiful cowboys from a John Ford western slowly turning magenta.
The album builds to the penultimate track, “comfortable predictability,” with an opening sample slurring, “Having a lot of beautiful things.” Excess is celebrated but also sickly. The track ends with Katharine Hepburn in the delirious adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer, stating, “Most people’s lives, what are they but trails of debris — each day more debris, more debris… long, long trails of debris, with nothing to clean it all up but, finally, death.” Chartier’s pink project feels like a glamorous set of ruins, a seance of the deceased drowned beneath a lagoon of Les Baxter jewels. Glace cherries, meatloaf preserved in cold aspic. Just one more martini before sunrise. All Intensive Purposes closes with a reprise of “wistful wishful wanton,” the first track from Pinkcourtesyphone’s debut Foley Folly Folio, bringing his project full circle. A twinkling voice repeats, “The most wonderful night of my life.” A hiss of carbon monoxide filling the apartment. The gentle hum of the refrigerator. We glide softly across escalators into the perfect arms of mannequins. It feels just like heaven.
—foxydigitalis.zone
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Another fresh one released via the Australian Room40-imprint on June 10th, 2k22 is All Intensive Purposes, the latest full length album effort created by Richard Cartier under his sonic nom de guerre that is Pinkcourtesyphone. The project, described in the accompanying press release as ‘…operating at nexus of recollecting 20th century anxiety and opulence…’, caters a total of seven brand new pieces rolled out over a total playtime of roughly 38 minutes starting from a point of warm, subaquatic and ever embracing DarkAmbient x Deep Listening Music with “That Intangible Object Of Contempt / The Tenderness Of…” which paves the way for all things to come like the icy, shrieking and sci-fi-leaning ColdAmbient structures of “Drained By The Very Nearness” or the subsequent crackly atmospheres to be discovered in “Serving Autosuggestion” which later serves an eerie climax of reprocessed vocals evoking memories of mid-90s works by acts like Single Cell Orchestra. Furthermore “Out Of Abundance” presents another expertly crafted, well harmonic example of spine-tingling Dark Ambient whereas “Crushing Softness” takes tender, glacial Ambient to a glistening, yet most minimalist level before the “Comfortable Predictability”, its rumbling subs and almost (Neo)Cosmic textures provide a new, almost universal perspective on timeless and minimalistic sonic movements whilst the two minutes spanning “Wistful Wishful Wanton (Reprise)” rounds things off with fragile, angelic harmonies and echoes of icy winds blown over from afar for closing. Recommended for all fans and followers of Deep Listening Music / Minimal Music.
—nitestylez.de
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In case you’ve been living under a rock [how dare you!] or are very new to the post-ambient and minimal drone music scene [a heartwarming welcome!] let me remind you that Richard Chartier‘s very unexpected debut as Pinkcourtesyphone, titled Foley Folly Folio is now 10 years old! What? Read my review and you will notice the glowing words about this seductively haunting project, in hope that it would keep on going, because I truly fell in love. Chartier not only continued with his pink-hued exploration of “catastrophe muzak” with samples lifted from many mysterious vintage retro films [“You’ve got my number, and I certainly got yours“] but he truly expanded on the overall aesthetic which can now be attributed uniquely to him. For me, Pinkcourteseyphone is more than a guilty pleasure – it’s a desire I hide from the rest. It’s an addiction I stash in the cupboard and when no one is watching, I top off my glass. It’s a routine I sneak over to guilty, drifting through alleys and dodgy back streets. Here, the potion-induced delirium, reverie and numbness cradle me into a deep narcotic dream. And I really like it here. I feel as if I’m understood. “Here is a collection of moods which we anticipate and enjoy with no misgivings. A long trail of evening debris awaits your ears’ pleasure. Let it procure that pleasure for you, let it devour you.” Devour me indeed. Released on Lawrence English’s Room40 imprint [more from the founder of this label below], All Intensive Purposes is the provocative mistress of sensual charm. She’s the emotion suppressed in the depths of your being, just like the dirt under a polished fingernail on a powdered hand of a beautiful soul. Be very careful in her alluring – you may discover yourself in her depths. “A new sparkling jewel that already gathers cloudiness in its facets.” I think that it’s time that we polish it off. Highly recommended, especially on the heels of Leaving Everything To Be Desired, released on Room40 two years ago, which I’ve already selected as one of the best of 2020 releases. I highly suspect we will see this release on many end-of-year lists as well. Please enjoy responsibly.
—headphonecommute.com
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Album après album, Richard Chartier alias Pinkcourtesyphone ajuste le temps, guide les aiguilles des horloges, vers une destination intérieure aux sonneries désarmorcées.
Avec All Intensive Purposes, les débris volent au dessus de paysage hantés évidés de leur substance et remplies d’une matière évanescente aux senteurs subtiles, mélange de futur et de passé, de rêverie et de flânerie.
L’étrangeté aime s’immiscer entre les insterstices poussiéreux, amas d’atomes et de cellules fusionnant dans les coeur d’Univers en rotation.
Pinkcourtesyphone noircit sa musique, la dilue à coups de pigments naturels aux reflets ruisselants, entraine la tranquilité vers des zones doucement agitées par l’écho de sonorités évadées d’une autre époque, croisement entre ici et ailleurs, avant et après. Vital.
—silenceandsound.me
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‘You’ve got my number and I’ve certainly got yours,’ offers a pompous English voice during the opener, ‘that intangible object of contempt / the tenderness of…’, the music swells dramatically echoing the significance of the statement and we’re knee deep in confected sound art melodrama. But here’s the thing. I don’t have Pinkcourtesyphone’s number at all. I’ve been listening for weeks and though it effortlessly drags me deep within until I’m submerged in muted atmospheric tones and grand semi musical drones, I never quite manage to work out what’s happening. In this sense it feels more elusive than its predecessor, 2020’s Leaving Everything To Be Desired. I still hear grandeur, faded ballrooms, and a weary kind of decadence, but this feels more amorphous, drawn out – just out of reach. Everything is blanketed in a thick haze, and occasional (often repetitive) vocal samples that sound like they were recorded from three drawing rooms away.
They’re calling this “catastrophe muzak”, and whilst at times it can be dramatic, it’s too blurry and feverish to be a full blown catastrophe. There is an edginess, an ever present existential angst which becomes particularly apparent during a slightly humorous interlude about masks, which jolts us out of our sedated submerged lethargy and reminds us about our possibly stranger harder edged ‘real’ world. In this sense All Intensive Purposes is not an escape, rather it feels like we’re hearing the world distorted, refracted and filtered through decaying walls, reverberating through thick circuitry or plumbing – through our own feverish consciousness. I’m reminded of the way radiators and rooms sound in Eraserhead, the steady hums, the swells, the rumbles, the fragments of voices or music, spaces that themselves were given voice by Lynch’s own existential terrors. It’s warm but unpredictable, welcome yet dark. It’s troubling yet inviting.
Pinkcourtesyphone is the work of US sound artist Richard Chartier, offering a unique urban hauntological document of melancholic soundscapes, haunted drones and queer fever dreams. It’s dread as seduction, a lush enveloping and intoxicating world that pulls you in multiple directions simultaneously to the point that for much of All Intensive Purposes you’re never quite sure what you’re feeling, why you’re feeling it or how it happened.
—cyclicdefrost.com
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Veteran digital soundscape artist Richard Chartier returns with a new offering from his most sensitive and emotive ambient alias, pinkcourtesyphone. Far from the cold pure tones and minimalism of his early days, this new album All Intensive Purposes, like others from the alias, sees Chartier creating a billowing reverberant sound closer to traditional space ambient.
The 1st piece is “That Intangible Object of Contempt / The Tenderness of…”, continuing a tradition of expressive yearning titles from this project. Moving away from the whispered voice loops and other repetitious material found on the early ‘PCP’ recordings, the whooshing current here has no tempo at all, undulating like a cloud of underwater bubbles, or diffusing in all directions like steam. Faint animal-like cries appear in the distance near the end of the piece, and a brief sample of voice that sounds by its quality to be from a vintage film.
The second track is “Drained By the Very Nearness”, and captures a dream-like tension and irrational fear, a realm of child-like worries and imaginings. In general, this album highlights a quality of nervousness and fear compared to the hauntingly regretful Foley Folly Folio from 2012, and bears less clear emotional content. Its foreboding horn calls paint a thick, blackly luminous space neatly comparable to classic works of dark ambient like Lustmord’s Heresy, and is likely Chartier’s most ‘occult’ feeling piece that I’ve heard, the most esoteric and nocturnal.
A cold, unforgiving howl is the central sound of this album, a rushing wind careening through a vast network of unseen passageways. As tracks progress, it feels as if we are taken furthur away from any familiarity or exit, lost in an intimidating opaque massiveness. Similar to the experience of visiting a cave in real life, there is a strangely comforting quality to the inert coldness and unconsciousness of the environment.
Where previous pinkcourtesyphone albums were defined by dark string samples, moody emotionality and romantic themes, with “All Intensive Purposes” Chartier charged fearlessly into a fully abstract environmental ambient in which the personal and emotive qualities are hidden furthur under the surface. Increasingly in the album’s latter half, Chartier breaks his stone-like blank affect, and there are melodic moments, murmuring under insulating blankets of filter. Pieces like “Comfortable Predictability” and “Crushing Softness” are angelic and delicate, featuring the lingering wisps of choirs and pianos, glimmering in patient domestic warmth.
Overall this is a pleasant and rewarding listen for the ambient fan, with intelligently expressive chordal cloud movements that should satisfy fans of Steve Roach or Lustmord. Chartier reveals still more of a new intuitive, emotion-driven approach that greatly contrasts his beginnings with its analogue lushness and ear-massaging timbre. Perhaps of his most straightforward works, it is also among his best, for the charisma and craft of its construction.
—musiquemachine.com
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Latest from pinkcourtesyphone is called All Intensive Purposes (ROOM 40 RM4188), a title that cleverly turns a commonplace cliché in on itself and reminds us about the “intensity” which Richard Chartier hopes to achieve with his brand of ambient music. We’ve been enjoying his approach for some years now and am happy to report he’s not really varying the formula much on this record. His records always leave me with the impression of a gigantic luxurious hotel, falling into disrepair, and we’re slowly exploring its faded grandeur. But he sometimes manages to inject a hint of film-noir tension with his inaudible vocal snatches and inserted sound effects. The press notes have gone overboard this time, clutching at “makeup” metaphors to express the full richness of the music, using words such as rouge, lipstick, and perfume. This might be the result of listening to the album while watching an old Hollywood movie from the women’s melodrama genre of the 1940s, such as Mildred Pierce or Letter From An Unknown Woman. For my money, Chartier hasn’t really improved on his 2016 album for Editions Mego, but he is maintaining the quality control in his output and ensuring that each release has a pink semi-abstract cover artwork, thus creating a lineage of sorts. Maybe he could do for the colour pink what Yves Klein did for cobalt blue. I also detect a slight drift away from his usual lush, rich sounds towards something somewhat more minimal, ambiguous, cold, and disturbing. Fave cut so far is ‘Serving Autosuggestion’. You might prefer ‘Comfortable Predictability’, which could be read as an implied critique of modern living.
—thesoundprojector.com
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It is a strange combination of distant loops, layered sounds and ‘ghostly utterances‘, a hazy sound as if coming from a distant dream that would perfectly fit the set of The Shining. “Catastrophe muzak”, perhaps, but also a pleasurable listen.
—ambientblog.net
