RICHARD
CHARTIER
GROOVES MAGAZINE (US)
by Susanna Bolle
With
its precisely crafted, digital whispers and soft, low frequency
hums, the music of sound artist Richard Chartier, explores the
outer reaches of auditory perception, often traversing the space
between silence and near silence. Yet his spare, minimal constructions
contain a surprising wealth of sonic activity -- though they
require close, focused listening to perceive the quiet tempest
of carefully crafted clicks, chirps and deep, sub-bass pulses,
brewing beneath his apparently calm surfaces.
“"I was the kid that liked the white crayon,”
Chartier half-jokes by email, as he explains his long affinity
for the austerity of minimalism. A professional graphic designer
as well as a sound artist, Chartier's distinctive, elegant packaging
shares a similarly clean, modernist aesthetic. His interest
in making electronic music developed out of an early love of
Kraftwerk and the romantic synth pop of Depeche Mode, but his
tastes soon gravitated toward the more experimental tape collage
work of groups like Zoviet France, Nurse With Wound and the
Hafler Trio. Similarly, his own music became increasingly abstract
and, by 1989, he had abandoned the last vestiges of pop music
convention and structure and began creating dense, ambient soundscapes.
In the past few years, he has returned to these early, pre-digital
works; sometimes to remaster them with few compositional changes
(as on the 2002 reissue of Direct.Incidental.Consequential),
but more often to mine them for raw materials, reconfiguring
them into new pieces. For instance, on Archival1991, released
last year on Crouton Music, Chartier reworked two of his pieces
from the early 1990s, stitching them together into a single,
finely layered drone that retained both the aesthetic and structure
of his early work. A second series of Chartier meets Chartier
revisitations, titled Retrieval 1, 2 and 3, will be released
on three separate records over the course of 2005. In this,
the alterations were more profound. “"These,”
he writes of the three Retrievals, “"are taking the
older materials and recombining them and reworking them much
more than Archival1991. Much of their original feel is there,
but they are very different in approach and technique and composition.”
The changes in approach, technique and composition, which separate
his early ambient dronescapes and his ultra-minimal constructions
of the past seven years or so, was made possible by Chartier's
shift to pure computer-based composition and digital recording
in 1995. “"A work like Series , which is my most
minimal work” he says, referring to the fantastically
spare, inaugural release on his own digital sound art imprint
LINE, “"was born from going completely digital in
the recording process. I finally eliminated that pesky analog
hiss, which hampered me from using silence in a more compositional
way.” The precision of digital composition and recording
allowed Chartier to achieve not only that precious absolute
“"0” signal, but also to focus with microscopic
precision on the particularities of each discrete component
within a piece, sculpting them down to the finest detail.
On subsequent recordings, from the subtly crackling Of Surfaces
(LINE) to the gradual unfolding of Decisive Forms (Trente Oiseaux),
Chartier continued to explore what he has called “"an
implied silence that is not silent,” fashioning pointillistic
compositions that seem poised on the brink of inaudibility.
Indeed, without the aid of headphones, the delicate low frequency
pulses of Decisive Forms all but disappear under the weight
of the ambient noise of even the quietest apartment. However,
his most recent release, Set or Performance (LINE), marks a
shift towards greater audibility in Chartier's work. It is an
usually active piece and, although it is still whisper quiet,
it has a far greater dynamic range than much of his work, with
Chartier focusing less on silence - implied or actual - than
on evolving a spider-like web of audible sound.
As its name implies, the disc documents a concert from late
2003, and the live context explains its relative noisiness -
for obvious reasons, Chartier's live sets have always been louder
than his recorded work - it also reflects a conscious move towards,
what he describes as a “"less silent” aesthetic.
Perhaps the best example of the increasing sonic density of
Chartier's work is an ongoing collaborative project called Chessmachine
with Russian-born sound artist, Ivan Pavlov, a.k.a. COH.
Modeled on the long-distance chess matches of the Cold War era
in which players from either side of the Iron Curtain exchanged
moves via courier, Chessmachine ostensibly pitted the quiet,
ultra-minimalism of Chartier against the bristling high-voltage
electronics of Pavlov. The two exchanged sound file “"moves,”
which were compiled in a self-titled release on the Mutek label,
and eventually a “"match” was arranged for
the 2004 Mutek festival in Montreal. The concept was head-to-head
competition between opposites - East vs. West, Red vs. Blue,
Masculine vs. Feminine, PC vs. Mac, et cetera - rather than
collaboration. However, over the course of the various matches,
Chartier notes, the two competitors ended up adopting the musical
strategies of the other, with Chartier making uncharacteristically
loud, Pavlovian moves and Pavlov countering with almost Chartieresque
subtlety.
“"I always learn more about my work during a collaboration,”
he notes, and he has had a number of especially fruitful partnerships
with artists like William Basinski, Nosei Sakata (*0), and Taylor
Deupree. “"What I like about collaboration is that
things occur that you think, 'I would not have thought of doing
it that way.' If I go back and listen to my projects, especially
as 0/r (with *0) for example, I think 'What is this? Did I make
this? I don't remember creating this!' It's fascinating. I think
the best collaborations and the ones that are successful are
the ones where the two (or more) artists fuse into an indistinguishable
whole. When I read reviews of collaborations I have done, most
reviewers mistakenly associate me with elements that I did not
play, such as the live performance with Taylor Deupree and Kim
Cascone, After (LINE), I was the one who was doing more harmonic
drones and the rhythms.”
“"I don't want to be 'that quiet guy,'” he
says firmly, when asked about his recent forays into more audible
sound works. “"I don't want to do the same thing
over and over again. I have been getting back into more ambient
music these days and actually listening to much more old punk
and post-punk stuff. Electronic music has lost its edge to me,
or at least I don't hear much that I like anymore. Much of it
doesn't stand the test of time for even a few years.”
But, though he might be embracing his punk and new wave roots
(even organizing a bi-monthly club night devoted to Kunstpop
in his home city of Washington, DC), he is careful not to overstate
the nature of his musical shift. “"The type of music
I am doing is still dealing with focus and minimalism,”
he says reassuringly. “"It's not necessarily musical,
there is just less silence incorporated as a compositional element.”
And, he adds later, “"I don't know if my revisiting
the post punk stuff of my troubled youth is influencing me,
but
it certainly makes me bounce around.”
