Richard Chartier
Encyclopedia
Richard Chartier is a sound/installation artist and graphic designer
. Chartier is works in reductionist microsound
electronic music
, a form of extreme minimalism
in which the music is sometimes very quiet, sometimes very sparse, often both.
(Germany), Die Stadt (Germany), Spekk (Japan), 12k (US) Mutek rec (Canada), DSP (Italy), and ERS (NL), Trente Oiseaux
(Germany), and Fallt
(Ireland), Intransitive (USA), including collaborations with artists Taylor Deupree
, William Basinski
, COH
, *0, Kim Cascone
, and Asmus Tietchens
and has appeared on numerous international electronic music and sound art compilations. Chartier's minimalist digital work explores the inter-relationships between the spatial nature of sound, silence, focus, perception and the act of listening itself.
(Berlin, Germany), Lovebytes (Sheffield, UK), The Leeds International Film Festival (Leeds, UK), the Rotterdam International Film Festival (NE), Garage (Stralsund, Germany), La Batie (Geneva, Switzerland), and other digital art/music festivals and at exhibits such as Frequenzen [Hz] at the Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt) and A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968 and Visual Music at the Museum of Contemporary Art
(Los Angeles).
The book Blocks of Consciousness and the Unbroken Continuum (Sound323, UK, 2006) contains the chapter "On the surface of silence: reticence in the music of Richard Chartier” in which author and critic Will Montgomery
writes "Chartier's work has this overriding singleness of formal vision. While it is clearly formed of discrete parts, the work doesn't look beyond itself, it doesn't refer to other sounds or musical instruments, it is entirely conceived within the field of digital sound. And, like Donald Judd
's three-dimensional objects, it is faithful to itself as a medium: the audio is self-sufficient. Chartier allows his pieces to be governed by their own internal dynamics,finding specific arrangements of sound that integrate the various sonic objects he chooses to work with into coherent wholes.... The music has tended to be categorised in terms of an exemplary austerity. It is easy to see why. However, close listening reveals both a vacuum – that absolute digital silence – and an answering fullness. The counterpart of the work's vanishing quality is its urge to make itself present. To a degree, this is attributable to the way in which the ear bodies out the sounds it cannot quite grasp – the aural fantasy that the work brings into play. At the same time, it is work of extreme concentration and the sounds that are there in the music are rich with information. The work is ultimately experienced in terms of density as well sparseness, sensuality as well as coolness. The form of minimalism that Chartier has developed on his CDs favours listening conditions that are private, introverted and solitary. Yet the bareness of the works is illusory: under the microscope that he obliges each listener to peer down, a pulsating aural life becomes apparent."
In 2000 he formed the recording label LINE and has since curated its continuing documentation of compositional and installation work by international sound artists and composers exploring the aesthetics of contemporary and digital minimalism (including noted artists such as Bernhard Gunter
, Steve Roden
, Taylor Deupree, Christopher Willits, Roel Meelkop, Carsten Nicolai/Alva Noto, Asmus Tietchens
, Mark Fell and the first full length CDs by Miki Yui, Skoltz_Kolgen, and Steinbruchel). The premiere release on LINE, Chartier's Series was awarded Honorable Mention in the category of Digital Music by the Prix Ars Electronica, 2001 (Austria). In 2006 he was commissioned by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden to create a collaborative sound performance work in conjunction with the Hiroshi Sugimoto retrospective exhibit. This work, entitled Specification. Fifteen, was recently awarded one of five Honorable Mentions for outstanding contemporary artistic positions in digital media art by the Jury of Transmediale.07 Award Competition (Germany) and exhibited as a recording and presented as a live performance with a new video work created from Sugimoto's Seascapes at the Akademie der Kuenste (Berlin).
In 2009, Richard Chartier presented a collaborative installation with visual artist Linn Meyers where optical and sonic patterns intersect. Untitled, exhibited at the Art Gallery of University of Maryland (US) two 15 feet (4.6 m) by 8 feet (2.4 m) walls meet in an enfolding chevron, creating both a sound chamber and a drawing surface. The swirling lines of Meyers' drawing, made directly on the surface of the walls, fuse together with the sound piece by Chartier, juxtaposing the organic and the digital into unified sensorial space. With eight audio transducers applied directly to the back surface of the walls, Chartier's composition modulates and transfers through the surfaces. Untitled(Angle.1), a stereo composition based on Untitled was released on Non Visual Objects (Austria) as a limited edition compact disc.
In March 2010, Chartier was awarded a Smithsonian Institution Artist Research Fellowship to explore the National Museum of American History’s collection of 19th Century acoustic apparatus for scientific demonstration. Chartier will focus specifically on the many sirens, waveforms, and other inventions of the German physicist Rudolf Koenig including the Grand Tonometer (c. 1870-1875), the only instrument of its kind in existence.
Chartier studied at James Madison University
(Harrisonburg, VA) from 1989–1993 and received Bachelor of Fine Arts Cum Laude with a Concentration in Graphic Design and Painting.
Graphic designer
A graphic designer is a professional within the graphic design and graphic arts industry who assembles together images, typography or motion graphics to create a piece of design. A graphic designer creates the graphics primarily for published, printed or electronic media, such as brochures and...
. Chartier is works in reductionist microsound
Microsound
Microsound includes all sounds on the time scale shorter than musical notes, the sound object time scale, and longer than the sample time scale. Specifically this is shorter than one tenth of a second and longer than 10 milliseconds, including the audio frequency range and the infrasonic...
electronic music
Electronic music
Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments and electronic music technology in its production. In general a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means and that produced using electronic technology. Examples of electromechanical sound...
, a form of extreme minimalism
Minimalism
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence, essentials or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts...
in which the music is sometimes very quiet, sometimes very sparse, often both.
About
Since 1998, Chartier has created recordings for labels such as LINE (USA), Raster-NotonRaster-Noton
Raster-Noton is a German electronic music record label founded in 1996 by Olaf Bender, Carsten Nicolai and Frank Bretschneider. Based in Chemnitz, Germany, Raster-Noton merged in 1999 from separate labels Rastermusik and Noton .The collective label's aesthetic focus is rhythmic, minimal electronic...
(Germany), Die Stadt (Germany), Spekk (Japan), 12k (US) Mutek rec (Canada), DSP (Italy), and ERS (NL), Trente Oiseaux
Trente Oiseaux
Trente Oiseaux is a record label founded by experimental musician Bernhard Günter in 1995.Early releases featured musicians such as Francisco López, Roel Meelkop, John Duncan, Jim O'Rourke, Daniel Menche and Günter himself....
(Germany), and Fallt
Fällt
Fällt is an independent publishing house specialising in experimental music, fine art, design and criticism.Established in the mid 1990s by W. Conrad Röntgen and Christopher Murphy as a publishing vehicle for experimental interdisciplinary works, Fällt is now jointly run by W. Conrad Röntgen and...
(Ireland), Intransitive (USA), including collaborations with artists Taylor Deupree
Taylor Deupree
Taylor Deupree , is an American electronic musician, photographer and graphic designer. He is most known for the founding of the 12k record label, along with his work as a member of Prototype 909, and his collaborations with Savvas Ysatis and Christopher Willits...
, William Basinski
William Basinski
William Basinski is a United States avant-garde composer of ambient music via tape music and process music. Basinski is also a clarinetist, saxophonist, sound artist, and video artist...
, COH
CoH
CoH and COH may refer to:* City of Heroes, a massively multiplayer online role-playing computer game based on superhero comics, released in 2004* Coalition on Homelessness** Coalition on Homelessness, San Francisco...
, *0, Kim Cascone
Kim Cascone
Kim Cascone is an American composer of electronic music who is best known for his releases in the ambient, industrial and electro-acoustic genre on his own record company, Silent Records...
, and Asmus Tietchens
Asmus Tietchens
Asmus Tietchens , who also records under the monikers Hematic Sunsets and Club of Rome, is a German composer of avant-garde music....
and has appeared on numerous international electronic music and sound art compilations. Chartier's minimalist digital work explores the inter-relationships between the spatial nature of sound, silence, focus, perception and the act of listening itself.
History
Chartier's sound works and sound installations have been presented internationally including at the exhibits Sounding Spaces at ICC (Tokyo, Japan), I Moderni / The Moderns at Castello di Rivoli (Torino, Italy), 2002 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art (NY), Resynthesis at The Art Institute of Chicago and with the traveling sound exhibit Invisible Cities created by digital media curators Fehler as well as solo and collaborative installations for Fusebox (DC), 1515 Arts/G Fine Art (DC), Die Schachtel (Milan, Italy), and Diapason (NY). He has performed his work live across Europe, Japan, Australia, and North America at MUTEK (Montreal, Canada), GRM/Maison de Radio France (Paris, France), Observatori (Valencia, Spain), DEAF (Dublin, Ireland), TransmedialeTransmediale
transmediale is an annual festival for media art and digital culture taking place for one week in February in Berlin, Germany. The festival engages in reflective, aesthetic and speculative positions in between art, technology and culture...
(Berlin, Germany), Lovebytes (Sheffield, UK), The Leeds International Film Festival (Leeds, UK), the Rotterdam International Film Festival (NE), Garage (Stralsund, Germany), La Batie (Geneva, Switzerland), and other digital art/music festivals and at exhibits such as Frequenzen [Hz] at the Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt) and A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958-1968 and Visual Music at the Museum of Contemporary Art
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles is a contemporary art museum with three locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near Walt Disney Concert Hall...
(Los Angeles).
The book Blocks of Consciousness and the Unbroken Continuum (Sound323, UK, 2006) contains the chapter "On the surface of silence: reticence in the music of Richard Chartier” in which author and critic Will Montgomery
Will Montgomery
Will Montgomery is an American football center for the Washington Redskins of the National Football League. He was drafted by the Carolina Panthers in the seventh round of the 2006 NFL Draft...
writes "Chartier's work has this overriding singleness of formal vision. While it is clearly formed of discrete parts, the work doesn't look beyond itself, it doesn't refer to other sounds or musical instruments, it is entirely conceived within the field of digital sound. And, like Donald Judd
Donald Judd
Donald Clarence Judd was an American artist associated with minimalism . In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy...
's three-dimensional objects, it is faithful to itself as a medium: the audio is self-sufficient. Chartier allows his pieces to be governed by their own internal dynamics,finding specific arrangements of sound that integrate the various sonic objects he chooses to work with into coherent wholes.... The music has tended to be categorised in terms of an exemplary austerity. It is easy to see why. However, close listening reveals both a vacuum – that absolute digital silence – and an answering fullness. The counterpart of the work's vanishing quality is its urge to make itself present. To a degree, this is attributable to the way in which the ear bodies out the sounds it cannot quite grasp – the aural fantasy that the work brings into play. At the same time, it is work of extreme concentration and the sounds that are there in the music are rich with information. The work is ultimately experienced in terms of density as well sparseness, sensuality as well as coolness. The form of minimalism that Chartier has developed on his CDs favours listening conditions that are private, introverted and solitary. Yet the bareness of the works is illusory: under the microscope that he obliges each listener to peer down, a pulsating aural life becomes apparent."
In 2000 he formed the recording label LINE and has since curated its continuing documentation of compositional and installation work by international sound artists and composers exploring the aesthetics of contemporary and digital minimalism (including noted artists such as Bernhard Gunter
Bernhard Günter
Bernhard Günter is a German post-Cageian composer associated with microwave and lowercase movements or styles of minimalist composition. He is influenced by Morton Feldman....
, Steve Roden
Steve Roden
Steve Roden is an American sound and visual artist. Best known for pioneering the lowercase style of music, where quiet sounds are amplified amid long stretches of silence, his huge discography includes Forms of Paper, which was commissioned by the Los Angeles public library.-External links:* * at...
, Taylor Deupree, Christopher Willits, Roel Meelkop, Carsten Nicolai/Alva Noto, Asmus Tietchens
Asmus Tietchens
Asmus Tietchens , who also records under the monikers Hematic Sunsets and Club of Rome, is a German composer of avant-garde music....
, Mark Fell and the first full length CDs by Miki Yui, Skoltz_Kolgen, and Steinbruchel). The premiere release on LINE, Chartier's Series was awarded Honorable Mention in the category of Digital Music by the Prix Ars Electronica, 2001 (Austria). In 2006 he was commissioned by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden to create a collaborative sound performance work in conjunction with the Hiroshi Sugimoto retrospective exhibit. This work, entitled Specification. Fifteen, was recently awarded one of five Honorable Mentions for outstanding contemporary artistic positions in digital media art by the Jury of Transmediale.07 Award Competition (Germany) and exhibited as a recording and presented as a live performance with a new video work created from Sugimoto's Seascapes at the Akademie der Kuenste (Berlin).
In 2009, Richard Chartier presented a collaborative installation with visual artist Linn Meyers where optical and sonic patterns intersect. Untitled, exhibited at the Art Gallery of University of Maryland (US) two 15 feet (4.6 m) by 8 feet (2.4 m) walls meet in an enfolding chevron, creating both a sound chamber and a drawing surface. The swirling lines of Meyers' drawing, made directly on the surface of the walls, fuse together with the sound piece by Chartier, juxtaposing the organic and the digital into unified sensorial space. With eight audio transducers applied directly to the back surface of the walls, Chartier's composition modulates and transfers through the surfaces. Untitled(Angle.1), a stereo composition based on Untitled was released on Non Visual Objects (Austria) as a limited edition compact disc.
In March 2010, Chartier was awarded a Smithsonian Institution Artist Research Fellowship to explore the National Museum of American History’s collection of 19th Century acoustic apparatus for scientific demonstration. Chartier will focus specifically on the many sirens, waveforms, and other inventions of the German physicist Rudolf Koenig including the Grand Tonometer (c. 1870-1875), the only instrument of its kind in existence.
Chartier studied at James Madison University
James Madison University
James Madison University is a public coeducational research university located in Harrisonburg, Virginia, U.S. Founded in 1908 as the State Normal and Industrial School for Women at Harrisonburg, the university has undergone four name changes before settling with James Madison University...
(Harrisonburg, VA) from 1989–1993 and received Bachelor of Fine Arts Cum Laude with a Concentration in Graphic Design and Painting.
Solo Recordings
- A Field for Recording CD (2010, Room40)
- Untitled(Angle.1) CD (2009, NVO)
- Further Materials CD (2008, LINELine RecordsLine Records is a Brazilian gospel record label and it belongs to Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. Was founded in Rio de Janeiro, in 1992 with the intent to tend the gospel music demand.-Artists:*Adilson Silva*Adriana Ferreira*Adriana Marques...
) - Absence CD (2008, 3particles)
- Incidence CD (2007, Raster-NotonRaster-NotonRaster-Noton is a German electronic music record label founded in 1996 by Olaf Bender, Carsten Nicolai and Frank Bretschneider. Based in Chemnitz, Germany, Raster-Noton merged in 1999 from separate labels Rastermusik and Noton .The collective label's aesthetic focus is rhythmic, minimal electronic...
) - Current CD (2006, Room40)
- Levels(Inverted) CD (2006, LINE)
- Tracing CD (2005, NVO)
- Opening Coccyx Die Schachtel, Italy] CD/Edition 2005
- Retrieval 1-5 [ERS, Netherlands] CD 2005
- Re'post'postfabricated [DSP, Italy] (reformed+remixes) 2xCD 2005
- Set or Performance [LINE, US] CD 2004
- Archival1991 [Crouton, US] CD 2003
- Overview 3particles, US] CD 2003
- Two Locations [LINE, US] CD 2003
- Other Materials [3particles, US] CD 2003
- of surfaces [LINE, US] CD 2002
- typeof FälltFälltFällt is an independent publishing house specialising in experimental music, fine art, design and criticism.Established in the mid 1990s by W. Conrad Röntgen and Christopher Murphy as a publishing vehicle for experimental interdisciplinary works, Fällt is now jointly run by W. Conrad Röntgen and...
, N.Ireland] 3" CD 2001 - decisive forms Trente OiseauxTrente OiseauxTrente Oiseaux is a record label founded by experimental musician Bernhard Günter in 1995.Early releases featured musicians such as Francisco López, Roel Meelkop, John Duncan, Jim O'Rourke, Daniel Menche and Günter himself....
, Germany] CD 2001 - series [LINE, US] CD 2000 / reissued 2001
- a hesitant fold [Meme, Japan] CD 1999
- post-fabricated [Microwave, Netherlands] CDR 1999
- direct.incidental.consequential [Intransitive, US] CD 1998
Collaborative Recordings
- Fabrication 2 (with Asmus Tietchens) 2CD (2010, Auf Abwegen)
- Untitled 1-3 (with William Basinski) [LINE, USA] CD 2008
- Fabrication (with Asmus Tietchens)[Die Stadt, Germany] 2CD 2007
- Specification. Fifteen (with Taylor Deupree)[LINE, US] CD 2006
- Live in Los Angeles (as CHESSMACHINE) [LINE, US] CD 2005
- Chessmachine (with COH) [Mutek_rec, Canada] CD 2004
- William Basinski + Richard Chartier [Spekk, Japan] CD 2004
- Varied as 0/r (with Nosei Sakata) [12k, US] CD 2002
- after (Cascone + Chartier + Deupree) [12k, US] CD 2002
- SPEC. (with Taylor Deupree) [12k, US] CD 1999
- 0/r (with Nosei Sakata) [12k, US]CD 1999
External links
- Richard Chartier's homepage
- MySpaceMySpaceMyspace is a social networking service owned by Specific Media LLC and pop star Justin Timberlake. Myspace launched in August 2003 and is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California. In August 2011, Myspace had 33.1 million unique U.S. visitors....
: http://www.myspace.com/richardchartier - Audio interview about "specification.fifteen" with Hirshhorn Museum http://www.hirshhorn.si.edu/podcast/archive/Chartier2006.mp3
- Audio interview with Radio FranceRadio FranceRadio France is a French public service radio broadcaster.-Mission:Radio France's two principal missions are:* To create and expand the programming on all of their stations; and...
2005. http://www.ina.fr/grm/radio/web/WebRadio_V_3.08_content.html