Jason Lescalleet – Songs About Nothing

June 2012 • Erstwhile Records

It isn't often one hears about highly-anticipated releases in more avant-garde genres (even if it's Merzbow or something) but I decided to look into Jason Lescalleet after hearing a bit of hype for Songs About Nothing. Even after a few listens of this album, I'm still a bit perplexed—it's mostly enjoyable, but it's hard to say why.

The album's first disc ia a challenging one for me and I'm really not sure how to approach it. While I'm almost always one to fully dive into noise and sound collage sorts of albums, this one is very difficult to penetrate. Each individual track is so different in sound that it's hard to get a grip on what I'm listening to. On the first disc, the short tracks jump around crazily—pure noise, EAI, crackly glitch, drone, dark ambient, and of course the Big Black samples dance in and out of the picture. On one hand, the pieces themselves are pretty neat and Lescalleet crafts a lot of pleasing textures; on the other hand, I feel like each one of these pieces (the good ones, anyway) really deserve to be more fleshed-out. What we get are thirteen bite-sized bits of musique concrète but most of the album deserves better than that.

However the more quiet and introspective tracks (mainly "Escargot" through "Friday Night in a Catholic Home") really grabbed me—the softer ambience, subtle background sounds, warm drones: that was the point where I really started to get into the album. It's simply a shame that, again, they were so short.

The second disc, a forty-three minute long soundscape, is (to me) a bit more typical of the minimal noise / drone I usually listen to—eerie drones, pulsing ominous synths, deep dark bass frequencies, and some interesting processed sampling. It slowly evolves into some abstract microsound / ambient / field recordings akin to the tracks I mentioned on the first disc; it's pleasing stuff (though there's not much to say about it).

I think Lescalleet handles the long-form album much better, as "The Future Belongs to No One" is much easier for me to get into and appreciate, one of those pieces that it's too easy to get lost in. It doesn't pound the listener with harsh changes or out-of-place samples (except for the last few minutes—but let's just pretend like that part never happened).

Again, I'm still not really sure what to take from Songs About Nothing—is it ahead of its time, that we're seeing this sort of avant-garde music made into a more accessible and listener-friendly format? Or is it just a self-indulgent exercise in sound composition? Or neither? I don't know. Taken at face value, as a simple album on its own, it's okay. It has its highs and lows, like any other release, and for me that's all it is.

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Minóy – Celebration of the Sunrise

1987 • self-released

Somewhere in the deep, dark recesses of the lost '80s underground lies Minóy, whom I know nothing about, except that he (she? they?) made a handful of obscure tapes of experimental music. This one, Celebration of the Sunrise, is a decent but ultimately disappointing representation of their work.

This particular tape harbors a collection of musique concrète, drones, electronics, and found sounds, all mashed up together in a long droning fever dream. It sounds like being lost in a huge '70s-era data computing center stationed underwater—echoing synth glitches and voice samples come from all sides while low scrapings and pulses drone on underneath. During "Celebration of the Sunrise", you're stumbling between racks of flashing lights while machines beep incessantly; then on "Nightride" you've escaped but are now trapped in a flooding radio room.

Of course, at an hour and a half with little variation to the sounds, Celebration of the Sunrise gets fatiguing quite fast. Each side of the tape is more or less the same thing for its entire forty-five minute duration, and they are each only interesting for about ten minutes. After that the music loses its novelty and becomes a bit dull.

It also means that there really isn't much to say about the album at all. It has two decent, if long, tracks, and that's it. It's disappointing because, had Minóy definitely had the potential to put together an excellent tape of shorter pieces similar to this, but it didn't happen.

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