Always enjoy the records of pinkcourtesyphone, i.e. Richard Chartier from Los Angeles, even if he might be charged with making the same record over every time and I myself am running out of anything useful to say about it. Seems even the press release has given up on that account, lapsing into paragraphs of vague, fact-free musing with lots of ellipses and impressionistic remarks.
Arise In Sinking Feelings (ROOM 40 RM4230) might represent a new benchmark of self-effacing sound production from this most ambient and wispy of creators, particularly on a long track like ‘Within Moments / When Static Alludes To Apprehension’, which has been so bleached, pared-down, withered on the vine and steeped in a bucket of starch, that…well, I forget the rest. It’s more like encountering an implanted memory of music, something you may have heard once in a previous life that’s removed from your own, and in fact belongs to someone else – probably a fictional character in a book that never existed. And if you want further confirmation of this abiding theme of ‘absence’, then allow me to direct you towards ‘Gesturing at an object until it is gone’, where not only the sound he makes but the title itself work together as a benign form of magic spell that can potentially erase solid matter in the physical world. Even the card cover is part of this plan; an image of a woman in a window, whisked right out of a world of pre-1950 film noir, is printed in his trademark pink, and mysteriously turned upside down, then embossed into the card.
To those who question whether pinkcourtesyphone’s music is “unemotional”, I deny nothing, except to suggest that the emotion has been carefully hidden under layers of gauzy fog, and you have to conduct a nocturnal search by torchlight if you want to find anything. (23/02/2024)