(05.10.08) Facts first. What we have here is an enhanced reissue of Basinski and Chartier’s Untitled 1-2, originally released in 2004 on Spekk. It benefits from the addition of two new works – “Untitled 3” and “Untitled 3 (reprise)” – and remastering by Taylor Deupree. And since archaeology and recycling are key to these gents’ method, a documenting of sources is called for: “Untitled 1” contains Chartier elements from 1991-1992 and Basinski elements from 2003 using the Voyetra 8. “Untitled 2” contains Chartier elements from 2003 and Basinski tape loops from 1981 and 2001 using the Voyetra 8. “Untitled 3/3(reprise)” contains Chartier elements from 1993 and the 2006 sound installation Mixing Desk commissioned for the Bleeding Edge Festival at the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, California and Basinski elements from 1997 using the Voyetra 8. “Untitled 3” is mixed by Basinski, while “Untitled 3(reprise)” is mixed by Chartier.
Poetics next. Listening to these pieces while meditating on the artwork is suggestive. A Rothovian affair of smudged browns from Chartier’s own hand, no add-on afterthought, the cover image, with its Rothko allusion. It serves as visual metaphor/analogy for the B+C sound. The method used by Rothko for his multiforms was to apply a thin layer of binder mixed with colour pigment directly onto uncoated and untreated canvas, then paint thinned oils directly onto this overlay, resulting in a dense mélange of merging tonalities and emergent shapes. With no figurative representation, the devil, and with it the micro-drama, is in the detail, in the contrast of tones/colours, and their movement against one another. This fits the architecture of Untitled 1-3‘s sound design equally well. Initially manifesting as solid soundslabs, layers of detail reveal themselves as the act of focused listening unearths hidden pearls.
Descriptives now. “Untitled 1” is immediately a static and ascetic space, though acquiring movement and colourform as it progresses through infusions of low-lying fibrillation. A bit of a dark drone horse, it beguiles with a withdrawn demeanour. “Untitled 2” is the star of the show, though. All over you from the outset, by comparison, tintinnabulating filigree motifs arc and tilt in slo-mo balletics over a soupy undertow. There’s an entrancing 30+ minutes to be spent in this minimal gesture maximum wooze version of the eerier side of space music – something like a Steve Roach soundscape with all trace of crystal trappings bleached out, leaving only a resonant drift of etiolated wisps and curlicues of half-figure to ghost glacially through an enshrouded landscape. “Untitled 3” and “Untitled 3 (Reprise)” are somehow more reduced, their very enigmaticity a challenge to mine their minutiae. The B-curated piece is slathered with a microsonic sizzle akin to Francisco Lopez , while the latter channels Bernard Gunter, wafting some spectral air down a shaft into some dusty vacated chambers.
Ending in appraisal. The communion of B + C emerges as a felicitous one. B, known for pulling out fragments of heartstring-tug big notes and simple hyper-expressive motifs and looping them on and on so as to transcend mere repetition-nonsense to become quasi-liturgy. C, on the other hand, famed for poking his microscope into those atoms of sound and opening up to wonderment all the protons and neutrons and all the bits and splits below only physicists know. And, it could be said, that here two heads better each one. For in combination, the two act as foils to mutual foibles – Fanciful B and Fastidious C. So Basinski serves to sex up Chartier’s starchy spartanism with some subtle emotional heft, while Chartier imposes a ration-alist curfew on Basinski’s tendency to over-spool out his romanti-cholia. Overall, then, in the temporal phenomonology vs. ultra-minimalism head-to-head, both sides win. And so do we.
Untitled 1-3 is out now on Line. [Purchase
