Richard Chartier - Series (2000)

Series is the 4th solo full length cd by minimal sound artist/composer Richard Chartier. Created over an 8 month period Series and employing soft hushed almost imperceptible high frequencies and bursts and staticy quiet low shifting tones… the works explore an implied silence that is not silent. a quietness that belies the activity and energy of the sounds. cyclical, meticulously subtle structured, vaguely atmospheric digital compositions. meant to be experienced at low volumes or on headphones.

For Series, Chartier was awarded one of twelve Honorable Mentions in the category of Digital Music by the prestigious PRIX ARS ELECTRONICA, 2001 (Linz, Austria). This work was also selected to be exhibited at the 2002 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, March-May of 2002.


"Sometimes the 'lowercase music' mindset threatens to shift into a debilitating introversion or a contrived diffidence. Pointilist electronica such as Richard Chartier's Series - released last year but just awarded an honourable mention at this year's Prix Ars Electronica in Linz - is a remidner how confident and engaged such music can be. As with some of the work of Bernhard Günter (for whose label trente oiseaux he has recorded), Chartier's music can be almost aggressively quiet. The sounds have been mastered so low that you have to crank up the volume to discern them. Even then they retain an air of 'quietness.' Such evasive sound events inevitably get tangled up with the surrounding environment. But it's worth stretching the ears in search of Chartier's sequences of exquisitely sculpted sonic events, as gorgeous detail bodies forth out of the shadows. superb."