PINKCOURTESYPHONE

Richard Chartier (b. 1971) has been recording near-inaudible electronic compositions from Los Angeles since 1998, placing him among the earliest and most persistent figures in minimalist sound art. His solo work strips music to its spatial fundamentals: silence, focus, micro-texture, best heard at low volume or through headphones. Under the alias Pinkcourtesyphone he works a different register entirely, producing dense, atmospheric pieces with collaborators like Cosey Fanni Tutti and Kid Congo Powers. The list of rooms his work has occupied reads like a curator's wish list: the Whitney Biennial, Centre Pompidou, ICC Tokyo, the Hirshhorn. His label LINE, founded in 2000, has published over 150 editions of international minimalist sound art. A 2010 Smithsonian Fellowship sent him to record a collection of 670 nineteenth-century tuning forks built by the German physicist Rudolf Koenig.