Pinkcourtesyphone

Richard Chartier, the noted sound designer and installation artist behind the Line imprint, created Pinkcourtesyphone as an outlet for his more expansive explorations. Whereas his solo recordings emphasize stark minimalism through sustained low-frequency tones and their interplay with quiet, the Pinkcourtesyphone material leans toward heightened emotional resonance. Its pieces consistently conjure an oneiric atmosphere via swelling ambient cycles, environmental captures, isolated spoken fragments, and a pronounced filmic sensibility, all enveloped in hazy reverberation that lends the work a haunting allure through wistful, broken vocal snippets and shadowy melodic figures.

Although Chartier first experimented with the Pinkcourtesyphone alias in the late 1990s, the project surfaced publicly only in 2012 via a pair of albums: Elegant & Detached on Lawrence English’s Room40 and Foley Folly Folio on Line. These debut releases drew swift acclaim within experimental circles, prompting further activity that included a 2013 vinyl edition of Foley Folly Folio issued by Boomkat Editions. That same year the Canadian label IO Sound put out the Phototrashed EP, a more rhythm-oriented collaboration featuring vocals from Kid Congo Powers. A full-length remix collection titled Please Pick Up soon followed, incorporating reworkings by Yves De Mey, Frank Bretschneider, COH, and additional contributors that spanned pure drone, Coil-inflected industrial textures, and dub techno. Two further albums appeared in 2014: A Ravishment of Mirror, issued on the revived Dragon’s Eye Recordings, and the elegiac Description of Problem on Line, which incorporated contributions from William Basinski, Cosey Fanni Tutti, AGF, and others. Line issued Three Themes digitally in 2015, presenting elongated versions of earlier material, while Important Records released the album-length Sentimental Something. Editions Mego closed the sequence in late 2016 with Taking into Account Only a Portion of Your Emotions.