As part of our collaboration with MUTEK, the long-standing Montreal-based festival for digital creativity and electronic music, we are excited to announce that Richard Chartier & Grand River will contribute new meditative compositions for Soundworks. Both artists have cultivated their own singular approaches to sound design, inviting a deeper level of participation in the listener. They will share excerpts of their new works and participate in the discussion during our panel exploring creative approaches to mindful sound at MUTEK Forum 7.
If you’re not yet familiar with their work, read on for more context on why we find their method so inspiring, and listen to some of our favorite compositions from their oeuvre.
Aimée Portioli’s Grand River project channels her enthusiasm for both minimal classical music and contemporary sound design, weaving intricate melodic narratives through rich tonal drones and textures. On her sophomore album Blink A Few Times To Clear Your Eyes (2020, Editions Mego), the Berlin-based, Dutch-Italian composer projects a bold personal interpretation of experimentation within ambient, both melodically evocative and timbrally challenging.
Based in Los Angeles, Richard Chartier is a prolific composer who brings over two decades of experimentation in the field of restrained, minimalist sonic works. An experienced graphic designer, he eschews formal concepts of musical composition, instead leaning into visual design abstractions in a deeply intuitive process of creation, elimination and revision. The resulting forms evoke subtly evolving sonic spaces, suspending the listener in shimmering textural layers stripped of any conventional instrumentation or musical forms.
The Interreferences series (2020, Room 40) is, to us, a definitive example of this method; a realm of pure sound, detached from the presence of the artist or performer, in which the mind of the listener can freely move.
The two new pieces from the artists, designed for use as meditative sound works, will feature exclusively in Soundworks from early September. Stay tuned for more information on these and our partnership with MUTEK in the coming weeks.
Sound Is The Object: Creating Mindful Sonic Experiences featuring Lukas Volz, John Connell, Grand River and Richard Chartier in discussion will stream as part of the MUTEK Forum 7 program on August 25th, 8.45pm CEST. The audio recording of the panel will feature in Soundworks shortly thereafter.
