Both Chartier and Dupree have earned reputations for various excursions into the realms of digital minimalism – Chartier through sound field and Dupree via his restrained compositional approach. United on this edition to create a soundtrack for the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, whose Seascapes series is identifiably an influence on both musicians, Chartier and Dupree are clearly willing to spare no detail in the preparation of this score of sorts.
The opening 7 minutes of the piece establishes a strong statement of intent – a readiness to allow the audio fields to establish themselves in a most organic way. As the digitally processed elements come in to focus you can almost picture Sugimoto’s works, the lower etched electronics shifting away, bringing to mind oceanic tidal movements, whilst the upper tones and iridescent textures seem to evoke a light sea mist, which clears intermittently to reveal other floating sonic elements.
As their composition unfolds, the density of this work remains quite solid, surprisingly so in fact. Not until the end of the work does the piece shift dynamically, and perhaps this is the point of the exercise. There’s a real sense of dynamic stasis in Sugimoto’s Seascapes portrait work and here this visual cue is managed well, with an array of purring textures existing for the greater part of the work. It’s in the upper register and much of the processed electronics that the fine features of the work are revealed, again perhaps a reference to the Sugimoto aesthetics captured in the inspirational series for this edition.
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