CD – 901 Editions

Richard Chartier returns to 901 Editions, directed by Fabio Perletta, releasing his first solo album for the label. Founder and curator of LINE, a platform dedicated to sound art active since the early 2000s, Chartier approaches this work after some previous experiences with the Italian label: the collaboration with Yann Novak in 2013 and the 2016 project with harpist Gwyneth Wentink, released under the moniker Pinkcourtesyphone. In Eventual, Chartier delves into the fragile and shifting relationships between the sound and the silence, developing a listening path that demands concentration, openness, and a progressive slowing of perception. Here, the sound does not impose itself, but it gradually shows itself, requiring a vigilant, almost absorbed listening, where every minimal ripple becomes a structural element. This approach, however, is not without risks: the subtraction pushed to the extreme limits exposes the work to the possibility of appearing impervious to those who lack adequate tools to engage with its perceptive discipline. Space is not a simple container, but an active matter; time does not proceed linearly, it expands and contracts, sometimes suspended in a stasis filled with expectation. The plot unfolds through frequencies that emerge and recede, subtle impulses, vibrations that seem to be consumed while still forming. Micro-variations, millimetric deviations, barely perceptible modulations form the backbone of a rigorous structure, where every intervention is calibrated and every subtraction weighs as much as an addition. Precisely in this meticulousness it’s possible to perceive an almost ascetic dimension, a desire for control that curbs any emotional weakness, keeping the work within strictly monitored formal coordinates. Thus, a submerged tension takes shape, constant but never overt, accompanying the slow unfolding of the work without offering any real points of arrival. It is a rarefied work, built on a minimalism taken to an almost absolute degree, capable of enveloping the listener with a silent force but also testing their attention span. Absence becomes density, the near-nothing transforms into an amplified perceptual field; yet this resonance remains restrained, never emphatic. Within an extreme economy of means, Chartier does not seek immediate effect or easy gratification, but the threshold: that point of unstable equilibrium where sound seems to exist on the verge of its own disappearance. It is a coherent, severe, at times uncompromising aesthetic that confirms the author’s compositional clarity and at the same time reaffirms his distance from any communicative compromise. So, Eventual imposes itself as a work of austere intensity, rigorous to the point of obstinacy, capable of transforming silence into critical matter.

 

Richard Chartier – Eventual