Heatwaves are hell on ambient music. Tried listening to Richard Chartier’s new album on the Sonos—an array of speakers across the kitchen and adjacent living room, normally a pretty sweet little system—and got nothing out of it; the minutiae of Chartier’s extremely minimalist music were drowned out by the overhead ceiling fan and another fan I’ve got trained on the kitchen table, not to mention the fridge working overdrive. Headphones, not normally my preferred way of listening to music, changed everything. High, high up: a fine mist of treble frequencies gently undulating. Deep, deep down: the lowest rumble imaginable, as though I could feel the cruise ships’ engines idling in the harbor, on the other side of the island. In the middle: just empty space, like a cave, a cool wind slipping along the walls. Across the album’s four tracks, the proportions and particulars shift, but that sense of carefully delineated spaces remains, a 4D illusion playing out across your cilia and the curvature of your skull.
—Philip Sherburne, Futurism Restated
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Minimalist sound art has a sometimes deserved reputation for failing to evoke much of anything, but some notable exceptions really annihilate this stereotype. One such exception, newly released On a Continuous Form by Richard Chartier, places the listener in distinct and familiar locations with each movement. From moment to moment, we find ourselves under a railroad bridge, below deck at a football game, or alongside a highway in the rain, but in Chartier’s hands each of these moments becomes lonely and unsettling, as if you’re recounting a memory with all dialogue, internal and external, cleanly removed with only ambient sound remaining.
Chartier’s artist statement to come out alongside this release suggests that each moment of On a Continuous Form gives him the chance to delve deeper into a sound that he had already investigated early in his career, discovering depth within elements which before had only served as flavoring or afterthoughts. Unsurprisingly, On a Continuous Form flings us back in time, forcing our hands as we unpack moments that we didn’t even know we remembered. This is exactly the sort of journey that Richard Chartier can bring you on but that your dishwasher could never.
—outsidenoise.org
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on a continuous form is an album consisting of four parts. It’s a sonic study of the spaces in between sounds, and of the repeating patterns that occur—both in music and in daily life.
In these compositions you will hear a series of slow fuzzy pulsations, subtle wavering drones, low windy rumbles, soft cavernous gurgles, atonal hums, swirling noises of varying frequencies, fluttering abstractions, soothing environmental ambience and occasional electronic bleeps. There’s an immense and intoxicating beauty to be found within the spatial nature of these sounds, and Chartier’s unique ability to re-contextualize and transmute them into abstract and surreal audio environments never ceases to amaze me.
on a continuous form is a mesmerizing album of minimalistic soundscapes. Ominous and austere, slow and haunting, abstract and slightly unnerving… this music requires patience and time to unfold and unravel, but if you allow it to—it will slowly engulf you in the most wonderful way. An utterly hypnotic and meditative listening experience.
—audiocrackle.blogspot.com
