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.”
Pilgrim
(Glistening Examples) LP + CD $36.00
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.