CD – Room40

Pinkcourtesyphone is an ambient-drone musical project founded by Richard Chartier, a sound artist from Los Angeles who has been active since 1998. The combination of ‘pink’, ‘courtesy’ and ‘phone’ alone evokes a nostalgic and surreal aesthetic, confirmed by the dreamlike soundscapes and melancholic atmospheres that characterise it. The compositions are imbued with an ambient minimalism with touches of field recordings, built on a vintage aesthetic that recalls the decadent romance and urban alienation of the ’50s and ’60s. Arise in Sinking Feelings plays on similar narrative themes, evoking atmospheres of gentle nightmares and decaying bourgeois living rooms, solitary dinners, stale champagne and lost loves. This fascination with the aesthetics of kitsch and déclassé hides nothing but a poetic reflection on memory, time and ephemeral beauty. But it is precisely here that a paradox emerges: in the attempt to deconstruct the symbolic through its extreme aestheticization, one risks ultimately getting lost in an equally uncertain and conceptually indecipherable dimension. Let’s be clear, Chartier is skilled and demonstrates technical mastery in organising a sound system where each element is calibrated to evoke specific nostalgia.
The album works as a perfect example of what we could call ‘design melancholy’ – an artistic project that simulates emotional depth through recognizable aesthetic codes. How should the listener feel in this emotional branding of sound art? This is where the paradoxical nature of Chartier’s project manifests itself. The strategy of Pinkcourtesyphone is in this regard deliberately paradoxical, and in the conscious artificiality lies in fact a form of honesty. Chartier does not pretend to offer authenticity, but rather a sophisticated simulation of emotional experience. It is ambient music for an era in which feelings have become collector’s items. In this regard, Arise in Sinking Feelings proves to be technically impeccable, while also raising an even more subtle question: can aestheticization become an act of critical resistance in a world saturated with ephemeral stimuli? Perhaps yes, if we read its contextualization as an ironic commentary on our contemporary obsession with vintage and retrofuturist recovery. Pinkcourtesyphone does not heal wounds, but elegantly embroiders them in sonic semblances, inviting us to recognise the fragility of our emotional projections. It remains an experience to be absorbed like a Lynch film – fascinating, disturbing and deliberately incomplete, leaving it up to the listener to fill in the empty spaces between one synthetic sigh and another.

 

Pinkcourtesyphone – Arise in Sinking Feelings