Field Notes: Richard Chartier’s Procedure night, the DJs’ playground

FIELD NOTES: Procedure / October 27, 2015

Inside Melody Lounge, a small and quiet bar on North Hill in Chinatown, Richard Chartier looked up from his laptop. The 44-year-old musician and curator was wearing a black corduroy jacket, black button-down shirt, black jeans, black Yamamoto high-tops and black skeleton-print gloves.

“Jessica,” he said to Melody Lounge’s bartender and music booker Jessica Espeleta, “we’re up to 218 yeses on Facebook.”

“What was the previous average?” a bystander asked.

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“30,” Chartier’s husband, Bob Eckhardt, said, scrolling through his smartphone. “But a Facebook yes doesn’t mean anything. Oh, it’s 220 now.”

We’d hit the last Tuesday of the month, so it was time for Procedure, the low-key DJ night Chartier has been hosting since 2005. Procedure began in D.C., where the evening wandered between four or five different small venues. Chartier and Eckhardt moved to L.A. in 2013, and the night started up again in March of 2015.

“I start new things on my birthday,” Chartier said. The first L.A. iteration of Procedure was held on March 29 at Melody Lounge, a warm wooden box hung with red paper lanterns. Chartier simply approached Espelata, and she said yes.

Espeleta originally booked bands at the bar on Monday nights, but found the DJs an easier sell. The bands didn’t make enough money, so she prefers bartending and rotating different DJs through the space.

As she wrote out the evening’s craft beers on a blackboard slate with a pink marker, Espeleta nodded at Chartier’s Facebook count and said, “Cool.”

Chartier’s own music exists outside of pop or dance. He uses digital means to create what is sometimes called “microsound,” a quiet strain of electronic music that is concerned with the nature of sound, its placement in the stereo field, and the interaction of signal and space. He has worked extensively with visual artists and museums to create works that have their own liminal lifespan. His label, LINE, has been releasing work since 2000. As Chartier describes it on his website, “LINE is a programmatic sound platform with a strong inclination towards the visual arts and multimedia, born from the desire to take the tactile qualities of audio installations from the gallery space to listeners’ living rooms.”

Procedure is a vacation from this kind of work, a chance for artists in Chartier’s community — both in L.A. and abroad — to stop by and simply play records they like.

“I started Procedure because I wasn’t hearing different random interesting stuff,” Chartier said. “It’s always been ‘Here is electro, here is goth.’ I wanted a night where you never knew what you might hear. Our tagline is ‘something for everyone, and nothing for some.’”

Before the audience arrived, Chartier put on a DVD of “The Face of Another,” a 1966 film directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara, which played on a flat screen hung near the entry. The movie is about a man whose face has been torn off in an accident; the character spends the first half of the film entirely cloaked by gauze while his face is being reconstructed in a mysterious plastic clay. With the sound off, the bandaged face and clinical settings felt right for a near-Halloween evening. Glasses full of chocolates wrapped in eyeball foil were set up along on the bar. There were no pumpkins present.

Chartier, under the name Pinkcourtesyphone, played the first DJ set of the night, using material that bears no relationship to his recordings. He began with a track from Alessandro Alessandroni’s 1978 soundtrack for “Suor Omicidi” (“Killer Nun”), which sounded like Nino Rota paired with a cheap drummer and a schizophrenic arranger. He followed up with tracks by Cabaret Voltaire, Skinny Puppy, Mica Levi and David Lynch, maintaining a dark but gently chaotic mood. It worked, which is not a shock — Chartier started DJing in 1991.

L.A. native Juan Mendez, who does business as Silent Servant, then took over at the turntables. The room was at peak capacity: 30 people, including the DJs and Espeleta. Doubt the Facebook yes.

After his set, Mendez happily shared all the vinyl he played. “Some of these are reissues. I want people to know about this music.”

Unlike the Pinkcourtesyphone set, Mendez played records that sounded a lot like his own work: variations on the goth sensibility, old drum machines, older synthesizers, and robotic vocals made robotic with only the affect afforded by the singer’s acting capabilities. He played Throbbing Gristle, Robert Rental and European acts like Bippp who worked in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when electronic music retained a certain softness even when it slipped into the dark.

After his set, Mendez spoken enthusiastically about other small venues in Los Angeles keeping the electronic fringes alive: Non Plus Ultra, Mata, and Human Resources, the last only a block or two from Melody Lounge. As the final DJ, dublab co-founder Alejandro Cohen, started spinning, Mendez said, “Yeah, there’s tons going on. Not everybody knows, and that’s fine.”

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