william basinski & richard chartier: divertissement

Divertissement is the third collaborative full-length from minimalist composer William Basinski and sound artist Richard Chartier. The duo utilizes electronics, piano, tape loops, and short-wave radio to evoke a dense atmosphere suggesting hundreds of years of history rising up from the depths of a reverberating cathedral. Subtle, buried, and intense murmurs of melody morph through this deeply consuming and slowly evolving composition in two parts. Pressed in an edition of 500 on transparent ochre vinyl with beautiful cover drawings by artist James Elaine. William Basinski is a classically trained musician and composer who employs obsolete technology and analog tape loops to create haunting, melancholy soundscapes that explore the temporal nature of life and resound with the reverberations of memory and the mystery of time. His epic four-disc masterwork The Disintegration Loops was chosen by Pitchfork Media as one of the top 50 albums of 2004; upon its reissue in 2012, Pitchfork awarded it a score of 10 and the title of best reissue of the year. Installations and films made in collaboration with artist and filmmaker James Elaine have been presented in festivals and museums internationally, and his concerts are presented to sold-out crowds around the world. Basinski was chosen by Antony Hegarty to create music for Robert Wilson's 2011 opera The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic. Maxim Moston's orchestral transcriptions of The Disintegration Loops have been performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Queen Elizabeth Hall, and the Swiss festival La Bâtie. Richard Chartier (b. 1971), sound and installation artist, is considered one of the key figures in the current of reductionist electronic sound art that has been termed both "microsound" and neo-modernist. Chartier's minimalist digital work explores the interrelationships between the spatial nature of sound, silence, focus, perception, and the act of listening itself. Chartier's work has been presented internationally, including at the 2002 Whitney Biennial, and he has performed his work live across Europe, Japan, Australia, and North America at digital art and electronic music festivals and exhibits. In 2000 he formed the record label LINE and has since curated its continuing documentation of compositional and installation work by international sound artists and composers exploring the aesthetics of contemporary and digital minimalism. In 2010, Chartier was awarded a Smithsonian Institution Artist Research Fellowship to explore the National Museum of American History's collection of 19th-century acoustic apparatus for scientific demonstration.