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Richard CHARTIER - William BASINSKI

Untitled 1-3

Label: Line

Format: CD

Genre: Electronic

Out of stock

This magnificent collaborative album from two of the key minimalist composers of their generation originally crept out in 2004 as one of the very earliest releases on the Spekk label. The album now sees a significant overhaul for its reissue, with an extra two pieces thrown into the bargain plus a remastering job courtesy of Taylor Deupree. Although the original Spekk edition of the album went out of print within two months of its release, a digital version has been in circulation more recently. Well, it's time to drag and drop those files into the Trash (and then select 'Empty Trash...' from the appropriate dropdown menu), because this Line reissue is a considerable expansion (and dare I say it: improvement) on the original. For many it's the prospect of the Basinski contribution that will have the greatest pulling power, but Chartier is most certainly not an artist to be overlooked. As radical works of contemporary minimalism go, his 2000 album Series is every bit the equal of the now iconic Disintegration Loops releases, revealing an infinitesimal realm of new sonic possibilities at the periphery of audibility. You won't find much in the way of that sort of material here however: these pieces were among the first published works to document Chartier's shift away from the extreme high and low frequency experiments that made his early career so exciting. As with Chartier's cover art, these pieces take cues from Rothko's multiforms, masquerading as solid slabs of information, only to reveal hidden layers of detail that pull you deep into its internal, self-contained universe. Once you've become acclimatised to the profound aloofness of the first piece's drone tones, you'll find all manner of textures revealing themselves across its twenty-minute span. The composition draws on the industrial-inspired early nineties work from Chartier's archive in combination with more recent Basinski recordings using the Voyetra-8 synthesizer. The next piece covers an expansive thirty-five minutes, and features a more transparent sense of harmony, combining chiming pitches with more nebulous undercurrents. There's a case to be made for the bonus tracks as the real highlights on the disc. The Basinski-mixed 'Untitled 3' and Chartier-produced 'Untitled 3 (Reprise)' are somehow more condensed, even richer in terms of details and minutiae, the former immersed within a crackling acousmatic sound world reminiscent of Francisco Lopez and the latter like some ghostly gust of air shooting through chilly abandoned corridors. This is just about as good as modern drone music gets. (Boomkat.com)

 

Details
Cat. number: line 034
Year: 2008

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