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Asmus Tietchens + Richard Chartier, "Fabrication"
A cross-generational collaboration between these two giants of the world of esoteric sound manifests itself exactly as would be imagined, and for the listener who is willing to give it the close attention it requires, there are great rewards.
Beginning as an open collaboration project by Chartier to work with other artists in manipulating is Postfabricated album for its reissue in 2003,Tietchens continued to work with this source material and eventually approached Chartier to work together on it as a formal collaboration, hence this single, 51 minute piece, "Fabrication." In addition to the album, Die Stadt has seen fit to include Prefabrication, a second disc of the full material Tietchens reworked for the original Postfabrication project as well, which is similar in approach, but stands alone.
The piece opens, unsurprisingly, in near silence. Eventually subtle swells of glacial tones being to appear faintly in the mix, then ringing chimes and what could almost be a cello somewhere off in the distance. The austerity of the work makes for some interesting side effects: As I am writing this review now and listening yet again in a moderately busy café, I am catching myself rewinding the track to see if that was a little bit I had missed before, or just someone's cell phone a few tables over. I'm batting about .500 on that, so it is an interesting effect to say the least.
"Drift" would be an excellent single word summation of this work, because there's a sense of sounds just floating in a vacuum on their own inertia, something simple that continues on and on with subtle variation. Once in awhile a more recognizable sound rears its head, a buried digital click, glitch sounds that could be crickets or part of a field recording of a different universe.
The 11 tracks that make up Prefabrication are more in line with Richard Chartier's solo work than the strict minimalism of Fabrication. Throughout the pieces a sense of traditional rhythm is frequently found, but painted from a pallet of quiet clicks, skipping CDs, and data errors. Most normal people would not be able to dance to it, but the patterns are obvious and clear. The non-rhythmic tracks also have their own character as well, the digital water-fall sensations of the fourth track, and the shrill, tinnitus inflicting tones of the ninth track stand out especially.
No one would expect this sort of collaboration to have a major crossover appeal, and I doubt either artist had such motivations in their heads when they began to work on this collaboration. But regardless of that, Tietchens and Chartier have made another wonderfully complex electronic work that is sure to be a high point in both of their discographies for a while to come.
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