Richard Chartier | Archival1999
Crouton | CD
Chartier's music tends towards minimalism, but bears witness to an expansive sense of scale and underlying sense of structure whose precision is almost sculptural. Points of sound - arrays in space - are carefully manicured and eased with gentle exactitude until they're placed with perfect X, Y precision. The consummate digital artist Chartier is fully exploring the possibilities that digital space can offer and is, in many cases, single-handedly mapping those spaces.
'Archival1991' arrives in typically minimal packaging and is limited to only 500 numbered copies. A reworking, based on two compositions from 1991, the sound is more full than recent releases and remarkable when one considers he created it at the tender age of twenty. Recalling the density of Francisco Lopez' recent works, Crouton accurately describe it as a journey "straight into a black hole" albeit "in the most comfortable way imaginable".
Pure works of composition - in the truest sense(s) of the word - Chartier's audible structures operate between the worlds of painting, sculpture and sound. Considered as sculpture, whose primary matter is sound, his works are rarely rivalled and he inherits a well-established mantle, effortlessly picking up where previous incumbents left off.
[AB]
