Pinkcourtesyphone — Elision

This short, single track collaboration between Richard Chartier’s queasy, somnambulistic Pinkcourtesyphone and Dutch harpist Gwyneth Wentink is something of an oddity in the former’s discography. Chartier’s project has been associated with coldly anaesthetised ambient music, with a strong thematic focus on contemporary feminine subjectivity. All releases under the name have similar pink artwork and usually feature sampled female voices at some point threaded through complex drones and microtonal experiments. Central to the listening experience is the feeling that amid the tense, vaguely paranoid minimal electronics there’s something like a medically coshed Freudian Id struggling to break free. Elision however is striking for the lack of these sensations, exchanging anxiety for beatific panorama.

At 19 minutes in durations it’s a good length to appreciate the lovely combination of Wentink’s largely untreated harp and Chartier’s superb ghostly electronics. The label Farmacia901’s stated aim is to curate deeply emotional music founded around principles of beauty as minimalism, music as design and sound as malleable material, and Chartier has certainly stepped up to adapt his Pinkcourtesyphone formula to accommodate this aesthetic. His electronics are saturated with pathos whether in the form of gently undulating waves of harmonic noise or richly emotive tones providing the perfect counterpoint to Wentink’s picking. At the midpoint of the piece the vapor-trails of the harp strings are recycled by Chartier into gently shimmering drones as field recordings of birds and what could be the rustle of wind through a field of wheat are added. It’s as far removed from the dark Baconian rooms of Pinkcourtesyphone’s usual output as could be imagined. The piece never takes off, never fades out, but rather appears to hover like a mist over a moorland landscape, sunlight, rain and cloud throwing different shades across the vista. It’s a startlingly beautiful, mysterious piece of music and an unexpected high in the Chartier discography.