Annihilate This Week
(Korm Plastics - KP3024) Used CD $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
On the ninth release in the Brombron series, Colley and Lescalleet find music in the natural process of decay amid the detritus of yard sale junk and old, broken equipment. These 2006 compositions seem weathered and eroded. Rather than aiming for excitement or dazzling expression, Colley and Lescalleet embrace the tedium of everyday life as something beautiful and compelling. This is music with a slow absorption rate and a high toxicity.
GRAHAM LAMBKIN / JASON LESCALLEET
Breadwinner
(Erstwhile - ERST052) CD $14.50 (Out-of-stock)
Subtitled “musical settings for common environments and domestic situations,” the material for The Breadwinner was recorded at Lambkin's house in upstate NY, where the duo treated the entire building and its surrounding grounds as a studio, welcoming in outside sounds, which were later kept or eliminated during two years of reworking and polishing. Numerous submerged fragments reveal the beauty in everyday life. Observes Tiny Mix Tapes, “The album consists entirely of sounds from Lambkin's flat -- the radiator, the creaks in the floor, the silence/noise of the various rooms/hallways, the neighbors talking through the wall -- all edited down to roughly 50 minutes from eight hours of tape…. Most everything on The Breadwinner feels a little off and uneasy, a little smeared…. But there's really no single epiphany here, nothing really to "get," no crucial subtext to be discovered. Instead, it's just about finding appreciation in sound and sound construction.”
GREG KELLEY / JASON LESCALLEET
Conversations
(Glistening Examples - GLEX1402) CD $12.00
Anticipated second collaboration by tape maestro and interstellar trumpet-biter, who map unexplored regions of free improv. Matthew Revert's video for “A Frank Discussion” is here: http://youtu.be/1-zXFx78ON8
Electronic Music
(RRRecords - RRRXENAKIS) LP $15.00
Xenakis-referencing masterwork by Due Processor Jason Lescalleet, created with analog gear (old reel-to-reels, tape effects and guitar effects). An appropriately thick tapestry of sound.
Love Me Two Times
(Intransitive - INT026) 2xCD $19.50 (Out-of-stock)
This twenty-three-track double-CD is the result of six years of live and studio collaboration between the Boston improvising duo of Bhob Rainey (soprano sax) and Greg Kelley (trumpet) with tape-loop operator/electronics whiz of some renown Jason Lescalleet. Recorded at a wide range of venues with correspondingly varied attacks (not to mention degrees of fidelity), Love Me Two Times provides as comprehensive a picture as is likely feasible of these three, from the microscopically subtle to blood smeared yawps, from gorgeously woven drones to, well, Julia Child.
Pilgrim
(Glistening Examples) LP + CD $36.00 (Out-of-stock)
An audio documentation of this electronics-and-tape artist’s coming to terms with the death of his father. The LP documents a performance Lescalleet gave after discovering his father had terminal cancer; its floor-rattling flux of abrasive, low tones invokes the purr of a Chevy’s engine Lescalleet’s father discusses in a letter reproduced on the record jacket. A snippet of the final conversation he had with his father is buried in a heat-haze of tape hiss and air conditioner hum. The CD further extrapolates on Lescalleet’s father’s email; its 74 minutes move from dreamlike bell tones, through abraded, metallic hum, escalating into fierce, brutalizing waves of noise which then cut to a recording of Lescalleet’s daughter singing the Irish folk song “Molly Malone” at her grandfather’s request. The book in which the CD is mounted has plenty more text and images. If you aren’t staggered by The Pilgrim, there’s something wrong with you.
Songs About Nothing
(Erstwhile - ERSTSOLO03) 2xCD $24.00 (Out-of-stock)
"Mind-erasing loops, avant classical drone and minimal cold wave threat," explain our comrades at Volcanic Tongue. "[T]he sound of pure entropy, moving from ear-scalding feedback sculptures through nod-out minimal synth repetition through scrambled choral works and widescreen soundtrack drones.... [A]n increasing atmosphere of all-out psychosis ... like you’re listening in on advanced surveillance electronics or experiments in sonic/psychological warfare.... The second disc consists of one massively extended track ... the sounds of helicopter blades, distant cries, riot tones, hallucinatory / piercing upper-register violence and huge blocks of eviscerated silence..."
This Is What I Do
(Glistening Examples - GLEX1101) CDR $11.00
A collection of previously released compilation tracks. “Lescalleet’s work is a monument to the notion that music is sound,” your Dusted correspondent will have you know. “He exploits the quirks of cheap or damaged equipment … [and] the malleable, impermanent ways of magnetic tape…. Sometimes the material’s origins are obvious, such as “Un Peu de Neige Sans Raison’s” church organ samples… [while] the ghostly low tones and flickering high ones on “Untitled” could come from anywhere. But whether he’s looping sound into long, mournful melodies or squashing it into tiny quavers, he consistently invests it with such gravity that it could absorb a black hole.”