Eventual is the sound that remains. Long after the lights go out, after the din of a crowded room is nothing but a blurred memory, faint resonance lingers. Richard Chartier traces the emotive grace living in sonic remnants, revealing subtle intensities in what others might dismiss as emptiness. In his solo work, the background becomes center stage. A hush is more than a whisper; it’s an eternal stillness cast in echo. For over two decades, Chartier has mapped the barely audible with durational focus, and his first solo release for 901 Editions lives in that liminal territory between presence and absence.
Eventual is OUT NOW. Richard’s website can be found HERE, and LINE can be found HERE.
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What are some of your earliest memories with sound? I’m curious about the moments before you even thought of yourself as someone who makes music, when sound was just something happening around you.
Earliest memories of sounds, there are three I think of immediately. The sound of the refrigerator with my ear pressed up against the side of it. The sound of suburban air conditioners and in motels on vacation. The sound of being buried in a raked pile of dried autumn leaves as a child, maybe age 3… I think I have a photo of me jumping out of said pile of leaves.
As a child, I imitated sounds a lot. Perhaps that’s the initial entry into “sound artist.”
I am reluctant to call myself a musician. I do not have musical training. I used to be able to play things by ear, though. I studied visual art and graphic design in college, but I was always an avid listener. Sound artist/composer is the closest I feel I can get… more realistic. But my work as Pinkcourtesyphone is far more musical, emotive.
So much of your work explores the relationship between sound and silence, but I’m wondering how you experience silence itself. Does true silence even exist for you, or is it always filled with something?
I don’t think we can experience true silence. Even in an anechoic chamber at ICC in Tokyo, I still heard my own body.
Unfortunately, in the past few years, I have developed mild tinnitus (after a trip to the dentist). When that happened, I thought, “Am I never going to experience the quiet of the outdoors in nature,” for example. It now only really affects me at night when everything is very quiet as I go to sleep.
Does a true silent environment exist? I am not sure. I think we all have different perceptions of silence. The silence in my work is often perceived not literal… a space between things.
Your work asks listeners to pay attention differently, to tune into things they might normally overlook. What does that kind of listening do to you as a person outside of making music? Does it change how you move through daily life?
I have had really good hearing since I was a child. I loved taking those hearing tests with the high pitches in elementary school.
I tend to focus on very small sounds around me that others might ignore. I’ve always liked the barely there, unless it is something incredibly annoying… like a smoke detector that needs the battery placed in a neighbor’s house, for example.
I used to always have headphones on with music when I was walking somewhere. Since the pandemic that suddenly stopped, my walks became silent, no music, no headphones… everything was much quieter, and I had more opportunity to listen to that quietness.
“Eventual” is your first solo release on 901 Editions after two collaborations with the label. How did you first come to work with the label?
I am not quite sure how I met Fabio Perletta initially. He has done two albums for my label LINE that are among some of my favorites, and I love his work in general. I think Yann Novak suggested we do something together for 901 Editions… Fabio had visited Los Angeles… my memory is not clear on this one.
The liner notes mention “vanishing tones and subtle variations.” I love that phrasing because it suggests something that’s there and then gone, almost before you can grasp it. How do you compose for disappearance?
Those are Fabio’s words, so I cannot take credit for that. Perhaps my work has elements of something being there until a while after it isn’t. I try to play with the perception of time and duration.
I used to compose starting with rhythms for a structural basis, and then it was a process of intense subtraction from there. So there was a rhythm there, but now it is just a faint imprint. I sometimes still work like that, but it has shifted away from that. I can still hear the rhythms that used to be there in some of the earlier pieces.
The album engages with perception, both space and time. Can you talk about how you think about space in your work? Not just the physical space where sound exists, but the space inside the sound itself?
I attempt to make work that steers away from literal references of sounds. Something that just is. This is not ever fully achievable due to perception linking our minds to what something “sounds like.”
These sounds are just these sounds. Perhaps that in turn makes the listener listen more intently.
In composing/creating, I look to a defined starting point and where I think it should end up. My live performances function this way, and my Dublab radio show too. How do I get from here to there… between two points? Those points can always end up shifting, and their paths elongate or contract. Time, linear space… from A to B.
I think in terms of forms, environments, atmospheres, and sensations. I often will go back to older works and dissect their sounds further to find the deeper within.
Sound, like light, truly shifts the perception of the space we are in. The more you focus on something, the focus changes you.
So, I love this answer, but let me ask… When you’re actually working on a piece, how do you know when you’ve created the kind of space you’re looking for? Is there a moment where you feel it click into place?
To be honest, I do not know how I know. It is very subjective, and yes, there is just a ‘click’ moment.
I set works aside and come back to them, having listened to them over and over and over. When it gets to a point where I am making super minute changes, adjustments… I have to tell myself, “ok stop it.”
It could be easy to get lost/stuck in that editing loop forever. I wrote about this idea of completion in the liner notes / PR for my 2020 album ‘Continue’:
“…I wonder for each, “Is this done? Is this complete? Why can I not allow this to be finished?” and what is it that draws me back into them. What determines the completion of sound, of composition, of experience? What determines when it fades—when it’s pressed onto a substrate?
One of the most constant forces in our lives, the sun, is always shifting, undulating, sending forth energy. To us on the ground, it might look basically the same every day, but we don’t notice the subtle changes to its surface. It has no true completion of form.
Upon release, I wonder if these are completed forms. I already feel I need to rework them. Aren’t we unfinished forms, too? Even the forms of recorded aural experience continue to shift as the listener re-interprets and re-contextualizes them in their environments and playback.”
The title “Eventual” feels loaded with possibility and patience. What does that word mean to you in the context of this work? Is it about something that will happen, or something that’s already happening so slowly we can barely perceive it?
You are spot on.
My titles for solo works (unlike the very loaded, puzzle of Pinkcourtesyphone titles) tend to be vague; it is just something I prefer. Non-emotionally, the listener can fill in the rest. I don’t like to define. “to suggest is to create. to describe is to destroy”… a Robert Doisneau quote that has always stuck with me.
William Basinski and I have a running joke about his titles versus mine. When he asked what the title of this album was going to be, and I told him Eventual, he said: “well… of course it is.” He is about the drama, the emotion, the torpor, and I guess I am about the sensation, the perception, the space. I am just so bland comparatively. HA!
‘Eventual’ was chosen because of the possibilities within that word. It has a kind of stasis to it, a stasis of expectation.
Mika Vainio and Asmus Tietchens had been on my mind a lot during the time I was working on this album. You can feel their aesthetic gravitational pull in it, perhaps.
There’s another phrase in the description that stood out to me, about ‘quiet tension that dwells within sound’s slow unfolding.’ Wonderful! I’m curious, though, because to me, tension usually implies something building toward release, but your work often resists that kind of narrative movement. How do you think about tension in music that sort of eschews conventional resolution?
More of Fabio’s wordsmithing, I believe. Every duration is a narrative, even if it is only the narrative of time elapsing, events, movements happening within it. Perhaps the tension he describes is the tension of something about to happen or not happening at all… an expectation.
There are moments that happen within the timeline of these compositions. It is up to the listener to perceive or find their connections. I don’t want to tell people how to listen or how they “should” listen. Out of my hands, into their ears.
You’ve been working in minimalist sound art for over 25 years now. How has your relationship with restraint evolved? Are you more comfortable with less now, or does it still feel like a challenge every time?
My restraint or the way I compose has changed. The way I listen to my own work has changed. I don’t think, for example, I could ever go back to making something ultra-minimal like ‘Series’ (2001)… the artistic “language” I used then is still present, but has evolved to be more complex, more layered. I am not sure.
As I have gotten older, priorities change, ideals change… composing comes either quickly and exponentially or slow and methodical. Usually, it is a combination of the two where I end up listening and relistening again and again with deliberate and incremental changes. So much of this may not be evident in the final published work. I don’t like to say completed work, because there is always something that could be changed or pushed further. With live performance, these elements can be expanded upon or given new context with other sounds from many years prior. I miss that part, having not performed as much in the past years.
Restarting my Pinkcourtesyphone project/alias in 2011 (after shelving it in 1997) was a big turning point for me. Even though it is still connected in some ways sonically to the work under my own name, it is more personal. Really diving back into some of my core obsessions growing up as a young gay man… cinema, queer culture, sampling, mid-century perceptions, suburbia, easy listening, gender roles, camp, industrial music, nostalgia, darkness. A big blob of interests pushing towards a sonic “opulence” as opposed to a sonic restraint.
So I have two very separate sides of the same coin that is me.
Starting any new work is a challenge, especially in the times we live in.
I want to make honest work that I can listen to (way) after the fact and still find something in it to connect with and enjoy.
You mentioned restarting Pinkcourtesyphone was a turning point. What made 2011 the right time to revisit that project after shelving it for so long? And as someone who creates under different names, I’m curious: when you’re deep in one project versus the other, does it feel like you’re accessing different parts of yourself, or more like you’re addressing the same concerns through different lenses?
By 2011, I maybe felt I could allow myself to be more “me” in my work. I had been in a long-term relationship and living with my later-to-be husband for 5 years. He encouraged me to be more expansive.
I wanted to embrace my humor, my obsessions, my nature. I also wanted to explore Pinkcourtesyphone as an alternate to precision, minimalism, and the rigidness of my work.
Embrace accident, embrace narrative, embrace emotion, embrace the political, embrace the hiss and crackle of the non-digital.
I see these as two distinct sides of me, my personality. There, of course, are times when things bleed over, certainly as a “oh this is a very Pinkcourtesyphone sound.” I do have to focus on them separately.
It is kind of like when I was still painting, going between sound projects and visual art projects. They rub off on each other.
The bristle between my work and the work as Pinkcourtesyphone is sensation/space vs emotion/narrative, but both things can inspire the other.
A quirky, dark, or emotive sound will always end up in the “for Pinkcourtesyphone” folder.
They also share an element of the suspension of time; Pinkcourtesyphone is just more gauzy and lurid about it.
I have to ask about the label, of course. So you’ve been running and curating LINE for a good while. And the label feels so essential to me these days – not many people documenting the sounds you are in such a considered way. I’m curious how that curatorial work informs your own practice? Do you hear things differently when you’re considering them for the label versus making them yourself?
LINE just turned 25 in September. It still shocks me. I really appreciate your words about LINE. It is very close to my heart.
I want to hear things that engage or move me on some sensorial or emotional level. That is the key. I listen to every demo I receive.
I want to be inspired by the music that LINE publishes, artists who see a different or unique perspective on what the very generic term ‘minimalism’ can become. I hear things through the same ears I hear my own work, but I do not want to release work that sounds like what I do or have done. There is such a variety on LINE, but there is still a distinct through-line to it. I hope others will find the connections.
What LINE presents can get easily lost in the constant cascade/tumult of music out there. I am glad that listeners continue to explore the discography and, in turn, become inspired.
And as always, to close… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
the muffled expanse of snow at night
the unpredictable loop of a bamboo sōzu in a Japanese garden
the whirring nostalgia of motel ice machines and the crackle of their cubes
the wind through the last few leaves on a tall tree in late autumn
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
