Richard Chartier’s good works for experimental electronic music minorities continue unabated, curating compositional and installation work by international dealers in contemporary sound art and digital minimalism. Latest in Line are Robert Crouch and Luigi Turra.
15 years of service as LINE manager behind him and Richard Chartier’s good works for experimental electronic music minorities continue unabated, curating compositional and installation work by international dealers in contemporary sound art and digital minimalism. Latest in Line are Robert Crouch and Luigi Turra.
Robert Crouch is a serious artist, with talk of ‘a conversation between tonality, context, history and subjectivities’ casually tossed off. It’s not all talk, though. Some cloak their creations in Art Bollocks, but ‘the intersection of post-phenomenological listening practices, conceptual sound art, and contemporary electronic music’ is in fact revelatory here. Crouch is no slouch, his talk of ‘archaeological spaces and their relationship to documentation, evidence, and media, and how meaning is produced’ is walked. ‘By placing my own practice within this frame, I was also able to refigure the act of listening as a method of production.’ His finding—that archaeology is cultural construction as much as a process of recovery, finds expression in A Gradual Accumulation of Ideas Becomes Truth. Long form modular synth improvisations were retrieved, patches created from them, dismantled after recording, and archived. Recuperated later, rendered sound objects, they’re modular crude for digital refinement at a site of negotiation between analog grain and digital glitch. The five resulting sound slabs bespeak endless expanses, Rothko-esque smears static/sliding, serene/uneasy. “Hohle Fels” is purest in texture; the rest are rougher, protean. “3184 Pullman, Costa Mesa, 1974” even has traces of errant rhythm; “Potbelly Hill” is febrile, subject to quixotic shifts. A kind of calm, more stunned than blissed, attends. Like his Organs (Dragon’s Eye, 2015), these pulse’n’atmo-dronescapes are configured for armchair-voyagers. Discreetly psychoactive.
Italian composer/sound artist Luigi Turra‘s interest is more lowercase in spirit, articulated in terms of ‘the aural balance between silence and tactile perception of sound.’ His previous on the label likes of Non Visual Objects, Unfathomless and Dragon’s Eye—most notably perhaps, a 3CD epic, KI (and/OAR) will clue you in. Alea, his first for LINE, shifts expressive spectrum away from the prevailing Japanese influence of his latter work towards sound narration, inspired by the work of French novelist, Marguerite Duras (voice sampled from the audiobook of her L’Amant de la Chine du Nord). A quiet but raw and bleak piece, characterised by periods of abrupt sound and sudden silence, tension and expectation–of what… is uncertain. Turra toys with fragments and echoes, and their emplacement. Like a film with images effaced, words reduced to mute sounds and encryptions, behind the name, Alea seems to tell a story, but at a remove, as if from errant memory, construction and conjecture. Seen as if through frosted glass, sonic landscape spectrally populated, mystery actors veiled in shadows. Strangely compelling.
A Gradual Accumulation of Ideas Becomes Truth and Alea are available on LINE [digital|cd] & [digital|cd]
