Pinkcourtesyphone – Description of Problem

Richard Chartier – composer, sound artist, designer, LINE label curator – has released over 30 critically acclaimed albums under his own name since 1998, building himself an unrivaled status in the ‘reductionist’ electronic sound art field.

As Pinkcourtesyphone, he has released released music since 2012 with a somewhat different angle – the alias giving him some space for a slightly ‘looser’ approach:

“Pinkcourtesyphone is a more emotional, dare one say musical side of his work.
Pinkcourtesyphone is dark but not arch, with a slight hint of humor.
Pinkcourtesyphone is amorphous, changing, and slipping in and out of consciousness.
Pinkcourtesyphone operates like a syrup-y dream and strives to be both elegant and detached.”

Francisco López – Presque Tout

Had this not been a release by Francisco López (who has been creating sound art and electronic music for over 30 years, continuously building on a massive catalogue of music and sound) on the Line Imprint label (“exploring the aesthetics of contemporary and digital minimalism” since 2000) – then I probably would have thought Presque Tout was a conceptual joke.

But it isn’t.
It’s perhaps the most radical release in ambient sound recording – its extreme minimalism perhaps only surpassed by the well-known ‘4’33″‘ by John Cage.

Various Artists – Liquified Sky

There’s a big different between ‘just music’ and ‘sound art’ – the latter requiring active participation of the listener/visitor.
A release on Richard Chartier’s Line Imprint label is not something you just take for granted, consuming it playing in the background while being distracted by many other things.
So, it may take some time and serious effort investigating the works presented on Liquified Sky” before these audio-visual works can be fully appreciated. But it’s worth the effort!

William Basinski and Richard Chartier


Aurora Liminalis cover

With about 60 releases since 2000, the LINE (L-NE) IMPRINT label has built a firm reputation as “a programmatic sound platform with a strong inclination towards the visual arts and multimedia, born from the desire to take the tactile qualities of audio installations from the gallery space to listeners’ living rooms.”

Curated by Richard Chartier, LINE not only releases impressive sound art CD’s, but also DVD’s and Artwork Prints.

With its focus on audio/multimedia installations, mostly electronic by nature, LINE aims at the more ‘serious’ –  investigative – listener: this is definitely no ‘pop-ambient’ label. If you insist on comparisions, the label may be best compared to Raster-Noton, in style and artistic approach.  

At the start of 2013, LINE announced an impressive series of new releases, of which the new collaboration by William Basinski and Richard Chartier may obtain the most attention.
But in fact, the other releases deserve your attention as much. I’ve combined the four latest releases in these two posts, demonstrating the versatile output of the LINE label.

AGF, Simon Whetham


Source Voices

AGF – Source Voice
The LINE SEGMENT series is a series of releases on the LINE label “which will highlight some, perhaps, very non-LINE-like works. Works that stray from the norm…(The LINEnorm, that is, because most music on Line itself definitely strays from ‘the’ norm, too!).
AGF’s “Source Voice is the second release in this Line Segment series.

AGF
(Antye Greie-Ripatti, born in East-Germany but now living in Finland) has worked for more than a decade “releasing experiments connecting voice, deconstruction of language, perception, and sound processing”.
If her name is new to you, you may have some interesting research to do: she has been working together with artists like Vladislav Delay, Ellen Alien, Gudrun Gut and Eliane Radigue (amongst others),