Jason Lescalleet stays very, very busy. When he’s not pulverizing your face-bones with his pitiless live sets or collaborating with every oddball name under the sun, he’s running the hell out of the label Glistening Examples. It’s a reservoir of rich sound pieces and thick, fuzzy, and all around mind-bending albums. (AKA: stuff we like.)
Following a fruitful year for the label — which included new releases from Celer, Takashi Makino, as well as Lescalleet’s own THIS IS WHAT I DO project — Glistening Examples is finishing 2017 strong with two (that’s right T-W-O) new issues.
First comes a reissue of Lescalleet’s first-ever solo album, 2002’s Mattresslessness, which is being reconstituted to commemorate its 15th anniversary. Then, a new drone project from Alvear Courtis Jones. Don’t know that name? Well, it’s none other than a trio composed of Argentina’s shamanic tape guitarist Alan Courtis (of Reynols), Chilean interpretive mastermind Cristián Alvear, and “undersea acoustician” A.F. Jones. Un pour tous, tous pour un!
For the trio’s first collaboration, A távlat, ha hátulról (“the view from behind”), Alvear Courtis Jones takes a Sprengerian approach to record construction. The sounds are “limited” to the tonalities of classical and acoustic guitars, using a system of pre-constructed rules that generate sine patterns to withdraw sympathetic and complimentary drone sounds from the guitar. After fully exploiting Alvear and Courtis’s shared six-string instrument of choice, the recordings were given to Jones who analyzed them, “as one might in a laboratory,” before producing the work’s entire body.
Whereas A távlat, ha hátulról shows Lescalleet’s label gazing towards the future (despite the record’s title), Mattressnessless presents a piece of its history. Lescalleet’s first of many solo records, Mattressnessless shows a young(er) Lescalleet experimenting with a wide range of glitchy, syncopated noises that would define his signature sound later in his career. “2002 was a period of my career that was quite experimental, and I was working hard to find my own voice,” Lescalleet says . “I was trying a little bit of everything. Mattresslessness includes field recordings, tape experiments, DSP experiments, experiments in microphone technique, turntablism, and exploration of the flaws of late 90’s era digital technology.”
Both of these records are out TODAY. RIGHT NOW. You can stream them both below or grab them from the label’s Bandcamp page on both CD and digital.
A távlat, ha hátulról tracklisting:
01. A távlat, ha hátulról
Mattressnessless tracklisting:
01. Ambidextrous and Half Japanese
02. Underscore
03. Clay Tapes
04. Straight No Chaser
05. Ineinandergreifen - 08 Dezember 1912
06. General Electric
More about: A.F. Jones, Alan Courtis, Alvear Courtis Jones, Cristián Alvear, Jason Lescalleet
