“the depth of it is just epic…like you could fall through it forever”
—Lawrence English, Room40
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“Excellent, Barely-there micro-minimalism”
—boomkat.com
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“Removed consists of two compositions that play out like distant, formless, icy drones, but sit in it and pick it apart and whole new levels of intricacy snap into focus.”
—normanrecords.com
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With both of his primary projects releasing new material at nearly the same time, it becomes tempting to compare and contrast Richard Chartier’s academic-tinged solo work with the slightly campy (at least in presentation) Pinkcourtesyphone, and at the superficial level there is a lot of similarity. Both Removed and Something You Are Or Something You Do are slow, sparse works that at times drift into near silence, but besides the mood and presentation, the actual compositional approach separates them most. The two are rather distinct works that each capture part of Chartier’s style extremely effectively.
Right from the onset of “Removed 1” (one of two lengthy pieces that comprise the album) the more clinical tendencies of Chartier’s work are on display. What sounds like the ambience of an empty room is presented: a bit of still air and only a hint of environmental sounds slip through but are not at all easily decoded. Subtle panning makes it clear that there is actually something to be heard, as empty and spacious though it might be. Eventually more distinct sounds appear: icy and slow, but they carefully drift in and fill out the mix. The piece stays extremely hushed for most of its duration, but it is that subtlety which makes it so captivating. Eventually the entirety of the piece becomes more commanding, a pastiche of rich electronics and sounds that at times rumble the low end, and at others are near tinnitus inducing. Towards the end he gets a bit more forceful with the larger, more enveloping tones that appear, but it is clearly an experience designed for headphones.
For “Removed 2”, Chartier once again accomplishes quite a lot drawing from an intentionally limited array of sounds. Opening with a passage of what almost could be wind, the volume is adjusted here and there but on the whole the piece stays rather consistent. It is comparably even more sparse: a gentle hum through frigid air for much of its opening. There are multiple changes and developments throughout the piece’s 23+ minute duration, but they are so intentionally minute and understated that significant attention is required to appreciate them.
—brainwashed.com
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It has almost become a genre in itself: reductionist minimalism, exploring deterioration (think Basinski), or exploring the artefacts of multiple digital copies (think Alva Noto).
Or: exploring what is remains after removing important details – think Richard Chartier‘s latest album (his first new studio album under his own name since 2013).
It’s a famous Miles Davis quote: “Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.”
Which is exactly what Richard Chartier does here on this album.
It took a five-year process of removal/erasure to form these two pieces (26 and 23 minutes). “Only trace elements appear from what was”. Only Chartier himself can probably tell what ‘was’ and what has been removed. But the result is a fascinating ‘ghost of a composition’ which presents a sonic universe in itself. An infinite and timeless universe.
Two ways of listening are recommended: you can play it quietly amplified across your space, changing the atmosphere of your surroundings in the truest sense of ‘ambient music’. Or, listen carefully on your headphones (be sure to listen on a decent system and using a lossless audio source) to hear all the captivating details of this ‘glacially paced progression of discreet relational sonic events and flows.’ I recommend doing both, though not at the same time.
—ambientblog.net
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Summer heat and my windows are open. John Cage famously said, “There’s no such thing as silence,” and New York City is your overachieving proof, offering up the pulverizing symphony anyone would expect to hear from a major metropolis at midday. Whining sirens and blatting car horns, thundering trucks and the odd, dopplering helicopter. On a smaller scale, an insistent, overheated sparrow on the fire escape chattering like a miniature teletype machine. The ringing hum of thousands of unseen air conditioners set on high. The sound of ozone dying. And underneath it all, and evident only when the surface noises cease, the air filter sound of the city itself, a kind of oceanic wash of silty air and endless traffic, rising up and combing through the buildings, playing them like tuning forks.
Within this welter of music/sound/noise, plays Removed by Richard Chartier. It hisses and swells, it ebbs and flows. It hums like the city. Sculpted over a period of five years through the careful removal of sound from its original musical surface, Removed is a monument to loss, to erasure, to the revelation of the remainder.
And in this exact moment as I write, the music has disappeared once again as the ring of a circular saw on the sidewalk out front crescendos its way through the room, drowning out everything else. But as the blade spins to a stop, a chiming sound emerges from the music to replace it, a chime that melts to a tone, a hazy drone that reminds me of having my hearing tested as a kid, of wearing cheap headphones and pointing to my ears to indicate where the sound was appearing in my skull, and feeling for the first time in my life that my skull was an actual space, a habitable kind of theater that I was suddenly sharing with this stranger who was putting these warm tones inside me to see how I reacted to them. I hallucinated tones during those tests, pointing to my ears at random in absolute certainty that I was hearing something. And it’s this particular quality of Removed that I find so compelling. I’ve played it four times today and each time that it came to a stop, I was convinced that it was still going, that the high keening sound I was listening to was on my stereo when it was actually outside my window, in the street, in the air. Not here, not anywhere. Gone.
In the age of the anthropocene, what does it mean to make music by subtraction? When something is removed, something else is revealed. An indentation, a smudge, a shadow. The palimpsest. And if you remove sound but there’s no such thing as silence, then what remains? Is it new life? Half life? At various points in Removedthere are passages when something emerges that a non-musician type such as myself can recognize as “musical.” Not exactly a melody per se, but notes, harmonizing notes. Only they sound deeply subaquatic, softened into something rich and strange, certainly post-“musical.” And the sensation created is that they are reaching a listener (me) only after passing through and being transformed by whatever medium they’ve become absorbed by. What’s coming through are the ghosts of the original material. Or new forms, new beings altogether. Addition/creation by way of subtraction.
Which reminds me. Probably the most notorious example of this in the world of visual art is Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning from 1953. The story is that Rauschenberg approached Willem deKooning with the idea of taking one of his drawings and erasing it, thereby transforming it into a new work. Rauschenberg was looking to repurpose the eraser as a drawing tool, but needed “something that was a hundred percent art…” something he considered deKooning’s work to be but not his own, conveniently enough. After a lengthy discussion with Rauschenberg spent working past the idea that he wasn’t looking to simply destroy his art, deKooning agreed and gave him a drawing, but one that he figured wouldn’t be easy to erase and that he himself would miss. The drawing, according to Rauschenberg was “done partly with a hard line, and also with grease pencil, and ink, and heavy crayon. It took me a month, and about forty erasers, to do it. But in the end it really worked.”
Rauschenberg, in an interview years after the fact, labeled the piece and the gesture “poetry.”
Chartier, who also makes music as pinkcourtesyphone, has a history of collaborating with visual artists to create immersive experiential works. In the case of Removed, the work isn’t directly collaborative, but it was inspired in part by the artwork of Linn Meyers, which adorns the CD cover (a media format on the edge of disappearing?), with Chartier not erasing Meyers work a la Rauschenberg but instead providing a kind of interpretive accompaniment for the kinetic and psychic force fields that inhabit and haunt it.
—slangroad.wordpress.com
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Un bisbiglìo, un fruscìo. Una tela white noise a bassa frequenza che cattura pulsazioni cristalline e indifese.
Rimastichìo e sospensione. Piccoli traumi mai risolti sferruzzano i neuroni come un elettroshock a basso voltaggio e, mentre le immagini soffocano tra le spire di un minimalismo austero, le dita osservano le pieghe del cuscino e gli occhi grattano le crepe lungo i muri.
Come le carezze di un tempo distorte dalla memoria, come i baci di oggi corrotti dalla disillusione, la spuma salmastra di un’ansiosa musique concrète pigia continuamente sottotraccia la testa di contrappunti più dolci che cercano d’emergere.
Una ricerca interiore che incespica sul suo stesso senso, microscopiche oscillazioni sfilacciano quanto un attimo prima avevano composto, Chartier come Penelope fa e disfa la trama del sound.
Gli occhi si sbarrano e le crepe si allargano, la tentacolarità di Michael Northam è ridotta in schegge e asciugata dalle sue passioni, il crescendo di un fluttuante drone ci sprofonda in un nero gorgo ribollente dove ogni pensiero è sopito, anzi…
Un tremolìo, un palpito. Una staticità spettrale in cui riverberi sfocati brancicàno le molli cartilagini dei minuti.
Tutto è detto, fatta ogni cosa, una bonaccia elettronica affloscia le vele e pialla le onde. Nessuno sviluppo, nessuna evoluzione.
Legati al palo del verbo essere ascoltiamo senza pericolo una stagnante malìa che non inizia e non finisce, Chartier come una Sirena ingombra i pensieri con l’alito di micro-variazioni forse solo immaginate.
Rimaniamo noi: soli, immobili e senza peso. Il denso nulla del Roach di “Magnificent Void” si fa terreno, conciso, spogliato da ogni connessione cosmica.
E’ il vuoto di una domenica mattina passata sul divano a guardare il soffitto, un vuoto umano, relativo, transitorio, dove l’affanno del lunedì è lontano, anzi…
—debaser.it
