As viscid melodics and glistening electronics fizz in a haze/daze/gaze, lo-fi moments and vocal implants create distinction, with a blend of retro-Pop Art, camp and ennui allied to a somewhat sordid sense of sexuality.
The two faces of Richard Chartier: i) buttoned-up own-name, ‘very formalist, minimal, and quiet. […] focused on listening and spatiality. Sensation rather than emotion.’ (Headphone Commute), and ii) Pinkcourtesyphone, ‘a project that extends into more musical and dense territories, beats, vocals, lush emotions, and fuzzy nostalgia. It has subject matter, narrative, emotional content, sexuality and lots of coded language in its titles, references, and samples.’ He evidently enjoys the freedom afforded by the latter, let louche off the leash for another run-out on Description of Problem. While previous A Ravishment of Mirror channeled a hyperreal faded-glory ’50s Hollywood with a scent of Weltschmerz, DoP proposes an ambient noir-ish narcosis of obsession and revenge, this time with vocal implants from William Basinski, AGF, Evelina Domnitch, Cosey Fanni Tutti, and Kid Congo Powers—who join PCP’s party line for ‘obsession and revenge musings and ache all down the wires.’ (Line)
Basinski voicemail fragments crumble eponymously over “Description Of Problem / More Everything,” lightly drone-hiss kissed timbres muffled in a cotton-wool lull. ‘Maybe too much… I want more… everything,’ the vocal revenant remote-intones. Echo-drenched French prefaces “Perfunctory Attachments,” etiolated melody remotely tinting the isolationist horizons of buzz-drone, dead air and siren noises off. AGF whispers over the queasy industrial ambience of “Our Story,” opiate haze colluding with bass throb to form a crunchy pulse. These short stories collect in a creeping fog of micro- tone and texture, spectral neo-industrial clangor and aether-harmony, breaths of static and vocal treatments. The desolate long-form peak/abyss of “Boundlessly (for M. Heyer)” hosts a lowercase footstep-beat and a glistening wind, through which Cosey Fanni Tutti slowly stalks with a hushed eerie telling of an abused woman–queasy-lush industrial-exotic crossovers conspiring in a perturbing, yet strangely sensual contours. Kid Congo Powers growls a heavy-‘verb horror-show monologue over the suffocating wooze of “iamaphotograph (darkroomversion),” which congeals beneath into a rhythmic warp for its woebegone weft of words. In infernal recursions of ‘I am a photograph, but my soul is missing,’ it ends. “I Wish You Goodbye” is more ethereal, semi-operatic sign-off, Evelina Domnitch crooning sweetly via phone to shimmering drone, a suspended animation of strings, a looped synth melody swelling into a hitherto suppressed Major 7th heaven, before closing down with a haunting ‘goodnight.’
Overall, while the aesthetic of PCP is at some remove from the more chinstroke face of Chartier, Description of Problem displays a similar compositional and architectural sleight of hand. As viscid melodics and glistening electronics fizz in a haze/daze/gaze, lo-fi moments and vocal implants create distinction, with a blend of retro-Pop Art, camp and ennui allied to a somewhat sordid sense of sexuality.
Description of Problem is available on Line.
