This is a plush, original ambient album. Richard Chartier develops his themes luxuriously and unsettlingly. A Barbie doll whose eyes follow you around the room from the shelf.
Ambient for the postwar suburban housewife. ”Formed from places, plastics and particulars” by sound artist Richard Chartier over several years, Foley Folly Folio is a soundtrack for the dawn of the self-medicating era, spread creamily like lipstick on plump lips. Late-afternoon Levittown ennui melts away as the sun vaporizes the last sprinkler droplets off the front lawn. A floral scent of Air Wick air freshener clouds her senses as she slips into her barbiturate haze. Hoping her husband gets home from work soon, she gazes through the window, down the street, identical houses each with a newly-planted sapling between curb and sidewalk. A young girl’s voice speaks of the “most wonderful night of my life” with Harlequin Romance breathlessness. Later, when the album begins to draw to a close, she will be whimpering, “It’s not supposed to be like this.”
“Here is Something…That is Nothing” is a confusion of thoughts settling down into fluidity, its atmospheric pressure dropping as it transmutes into “A Dark Room Full of Plastic Plants,” calm drifting in on an insubstantial, air-conditioned mist. But there is groaning coming from the unfinished basement, dredging up a grand ascent of fat, round notes. Each upward arc of euphoria is followed by a deep trough.
A suggestion of easy-listening music coming from the hi-fi is introduced by “Afternoon Theme” and loops in the air like cigarette smoke, doubling over itself until becoming an “Evening Theme” as candlelight and wine time approaches, and as the long shadows grow longer, things get creepy. The house is settling and strange noises are coming from the new Frigidaire. Woozy, recumbent, trapped at home in the Atomic Age, mother’s little helper is wearing off and still no sign of her husband.
This is a plush, original ambient album. Chartier develops his themes luxuriously and unsettlingly. A Barbie doll whose eyes follow you around the room from the shelf.
Foley Folly Folio is available on Line Segments. Buy at Amazon, Experimedia, iTunes or Juno.
