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RICHARD CHARTIER

on a continuous form

HEADPHONE COMMUTE’S BEST OF 2023: Music For Sonic Installations In The Cavern Of Your Skull

OUT JULY 14, 2023

Sound artist and composer Richard Chartier presents his first release on LINE in over three years. In this new four part work, on a continuous form, Chartier explores his minimalist sonic language. Detailed, subtle, and deep resonances suggested for headphone listening.

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In art, does the recycling of forms/sounds constitute a language, or a palette? Or are these one in the same? Repetition is part of our daily lives. Recurrence is commonality. Repeating sounds, musical phrases, and pauses all become ingrained.

Though a musician can and will revisit the same notes, the artist’s fear of repetition still exists. But in my work as a sound artist / composer, repetition is part of the language I create and utilize.

Spaces between sounds are part of that language, just as space between letterforms are part of language… a stop and start of symbols.

As I grow older, I return to sounds, diving deeper into them or re-contextualizing them, trying to further understand them. sounds within structures, structures within sounds…

reformatting…
restructuring…
refining…
re-finding…


All of an artist’s work is navigating on a continuous form that is the totality of their creations. Singular works are just part of greater whole, an extension of where I was then and where I am now.

these are spaces
continuations
passages.

a magnification
a fade in
a pause
we repeat
a palette is formed.
fade out
continue

resonating in repetition

—Richard Chartier

Bandcamp Apple Music TIDAL Reviews
Catalog:
LINE_140
Format:
digital
Edition:
open edition
Release:
July 2023
Tracklist:

on a continuous form 1 (07:06)
on a continuous form 2 (02:12)
on a continuous form 3 (03:56)
on a continuous form 4 (25:24)

formed and recorded 2021-2023.
thank you to Robert Gerald Pietrusko and Lawrence English
cover by Richard Chartier

published 2023 Touch Music/Fairwood Music UK Ltd

Richard Chartier (b.1971) is a Los Angeles based artist / composer considered one of the key figures in minimalist sound art. Chartier’s works explore the inter-relationships between the spatial nature of sound, silence, focus, perception, and the act of listening.

Chartier’s critically acclaimed sound works have been published since 1998 on a variety of labels internationally including Room40 (Australia), Editions Mego (Austria), INA GRM (France), Important Records (US), Ash International / Touch (UK), mAtter (Japan), Raster-Noton (Germany), Spekk (Japan), Trente Oiseaux (Germany), NVO (Austria), 901editions (Italy), 12k (US), and his own imprint LINE (US).

He has collaborated with composer William Basinski, sound artists ELEH, France Jobin, Robert Curgenven, Taylor Deupree, AGF, CoH, Yann Novak, and German electronic music pioneer Asmus Tietchens. In installation form, he has created works with multimedia artists Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand, visual artist Linn Meyers, and projected light artist Anthony McCall. As his project Pinkcourtesyphone he has collaborated with Cosey Fanni Tutti, Kid Congo Powers, harpist Gwyneth Wentink, AGF, and thereminist Evelina Domnitch.

Chartier’s sound works/installations have been presented in museums and galleries internationally including the Whitney Biennial and the influential sound art exhibit ‘Sounding Spaces’ at NTT/ICC in Tokyo. His performances have occurred live across Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America.

Since 2000, Chartier has curated his influential recording label LINE, publishing over 130 editions documenting the compositional and installation work of international sound and video artists who explore the aesthetics of contemporary minimalism.

In October 2018 Chartier was the first visiting artist for the Sensory Media Platform at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

3particles.com

REVIEWS OF
on a continuous form

  • 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

    +

    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

    +

    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