The Answer Is In The Beat

Pinkcourtesyphone: Please Pick Up (IO Sound, 2013)

November 17, 2013 at 8:01 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Remix album of sound installation artist Richard Chartier’s newest project. Plenty of dark, minimal, throbbing industrialist space-drone, but a few of the remixers add more rhythmic elements. Frank Bretschneider adds a slowly growing 4/4 thump to his rework of “An Awaiting Room”, turning it into hissy Porter Ricks-y minimal techno. Sandwell District/Opal Tapes/Line affiliate Yves De Mey turns in a seriously deep, seriously stunning rework of “Singularity Version”, with rumbling bass tones, curdling static, and precise sheets of rhythmic static panning through the speakers. Pjusk’ “Pinkcourtesypjusk” is a nice, crisp, crackly little piece of steady, minimalist IDM. Simon Scott’s remix of “A Dark Room Full Of Plastic Plants” is shimmering drone, which slowly gets colder and more distant. In the album’s second half, Chartier collaborates quite unexpectedly with King Congo Powers, who adds spoken vocals to “Iamaphotograph”, which rides a slow automaton 4/4 beat and camera clicks. Creepy Autograph (AKA Jimmy Edgar) remixes this into a tense, buzzy orb, with Kid Congo’s vocals sounding ever more distorted and sinister. Onetime Coil associate CoH cuts “Iamaphotograph” further into an excellent sliced, fragmented rhythmic glitch-beat track, with stark piano upping the fright factor. S* and Tomas Phillips minimalize the track even further, mostly just keeping the camera flash noises and stretching out a dubby, clicky sinewave pulse beat. The album ends with “Move To Trash”, featuring Kid Congo’s distorted, disembodied voice intoning over another hypnotic, gazing minimal beat with shaker-like sounds. Spaced out, electrified sounds, perfectly complemented by the gorgeous space-themed artwork, which features a gatefold with a 3D cutout that holds the disc.