Jason Lescalleet is a fairly well-known personality, having been actively plying his craft for a dozen or so years alone and in collaboration with people like nmperign, Graham Lambkin, Aaron Dilloway and Joe Colley. For anyone unfamiliar with his work, this collection of short tracks, recorded between 1998 and 2004 and offered on various compilations, would be as good a place as any to start. Lascalleet has stated that his main instruments are analog reel-to-reel tape decks, which he uses to record and play back, often using tape loops of varying lengths, and manipulating them in a number of ways.
"Un Peu De Neige Sans Raison" — whose titles translates as "a little snow, no reason" (a pun on the well-known Bernhard Gunter work?) — sounds like loops, but the sources are hard to pin down: a high-pitched repeating motif is underpinned by lower, slower pitches, all resembling synthesizer tones. Things waver a bit, like heat lines off the asphalt, and grow steadily louder. Static crackling and mid-range distortion characterize "Needles" before it quickly dissolves and re-aligns with a repeating electronic beeping that flips from side to side of the stereo image. A menacing low end comes up underneath this, accompanied by thin feedback waves and Morse Code. By the third track "Untitled", I'm beginning to wonder if at least some of these pieces utilize the same source sounds processed in different ways.
In an interview Lescalleet stated that his work inhabits "a sound world that occupies a space between noise, contemporary composition and minimal electronics", which is a good description of what's on offer here. "Tape Deck Model RD-504" conjures up images of slight malfunction with it's queasy loop and hum and squeak, and "The Destructive Effects Of Group Dynamics" gives us rain and some sort of air flow with an odd rumble beneath. All of these pieces evolve in quite logical fashion, even as they often surprise. Some of the sounds themselves are very familiar, without that pesky "heard it before" feeling.
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