Richard Chartier

The latest from microsound pioneer and LINE boss Richard Chartier is a re-imagining of probably his best-known work, 2000s ‘Series’, which incidentally was the inaugural LINE release. Since 2011 Chartier has worked on revisiting elements of ‘Series’ and reworking them into ‘Recurrence’, which was intended to be able to be performed in the live environment. One of the drawbacks of ‘Series’ was that its character left it almost ‘unperformable’, so this re-visitation of the source material was out of necessity more than anything, but the results are nothing short of breathtaking. Opening with ‘Recurrence (room/crosstones)’ we are subjected to an expertly rendered exploration of wavering sine tones, no doubt captured from room reverberations. Dipping into the kind of low-end destruction you’d more likely expect to hear from doom pioneers Sunn o))) but with the meditative edge of Steve Roach this is startling and surprisingly aggressive work from Chartier. It is with ‘Recurrence (series)’ that the record really comes into its own though, with a glorious exploration of his own legacy, deconstructing the sparse but detailed microsound treatments of his past and re-forming them into one almost hour-long epic. We know there are some computer music heads out there, and even die-hard Hecker fans would do well to see what’s happening on the other end of the spectrum. So good!