CD – Farmacia901

From Farmacia901, Fabio Perletta’s label, comes the latest work by Richard Chartier, a sound/installation artist and graphic designer who needs no introduction. Chartier is the founder and head honcho of LINE Recordings. He acts on this occasion under the moniker of Pinkcourtesyphone alongside the Dutch harpist Gwyneth Wentink. Wentink plays an exemplary replica of a triple harp, a type of instrument developed in Italy during the Baroque period but then adopted in Wales and appreciated in the traditional music of that country for its characteristic ability to obtain unison effects by playing the same note on both the external file with the right and left hands in rapid succession. Despite this Celtic grain, a quietist style emerges from the project and the textures aren’t folkloric at all. Although they overlap with different musical frameworks they achieve a delicate, accomplished harmony in the guise of a contemporary neo-classical and acoustic-electronic combo. Wentik’s playing is truly inspired and she gives her best on the synthetic, hypnotic and fluctuating envelopes by Richard Chartier, indulging in the magic of a mood that is at once both aesthetic and suave, exploiting the multi-timbral capability of her instrument throughout an intimate conversation between sound layers. The duo doesn’t produce any stylistic excess, all juxtapositions are carefully studied, dense or flickering, enchanting or enigmatic, tenuously claustrophobic or blooming – an intriguing and intricate bliss that envelops the listener for 19 minutes in fluctuating and sensitive spirals. Elision is the omission of one or more sounds often referring to the omission of a vowel or consonant in to make a word more easily pronounceable or for informal speech. This is – perhaps – the hidden metaphor in the title: we might return to a naturalness of sound that contemporary music has lost.

 

Pinkcourtesyphone & Gwyneth Wentink – Elision