OUT OF THE BOX #13

Jason Lescalleet (2001)

Out of the Box is an irregular series focusing on seven inch records. It’s an excuse to engage with my collection in a new way, as well as to write about older records and genres we don’t often cover at ACL.

OUT OF THE BOX #13
Jason Lescalleet ~ Another Example Of Parkinson's Law (2001)

Jason Lescalleet is a composer and sound artist based in Berwick, Maine, a location whose seeming cultural peripherality has perhaps contributed to the specificity and idiosyncrasy of his oeuvre. Another Example Of Parkinson's Law was released just a year after his debut, an abstract experiment in surface noise and tape manipulation. While a far cry from his more mature work of a decade or so later, this 7” is a fascinating snapshot of the early development of Lescalleet’s practice.

While closely intertwined with an international network of fellow sound weirdos, Lescalleet’s work often has the hallmarks of a solitary artist, more the agoraphobic tape trade by mail noise musician than the dreamy bedroom producer. Indeed, Lescalleet seems to most often be interested in the artefacts of DIY recording itself, be that exploring and playing with the textures of playback and recording or with the manipulation of the pop cultural detritus that accrues on tape. Over the last 25 years, he’s emerged as a leading figure in electroacoustic and tape music. He often deploys extended techniques for recording media, including reel-to-reel, cassette, and digital, to produce often minimalist works of abstract sound.

But it is difficult to generalize such a long and varied catalogue. Lescalleet is also a live performer, sometimes collaborating with video, dance, and other performance artists. This collaborative spirit has also resulted in frequent duos, including with Aaron Dilloway, Graham Lambkin, and Kevin Drumm. Other collaborators have included Phill Niblock, Joe Colley, Rafael Toral, Thomas Ankersmit, and CM Von Hausswolff. There’s an aspect of noise music to what Lescalleet does, particularly if we agree that noise isn’t about volume, and in so far as his experiments in abstract sound have little in common with “serious” or “academic” music. Like the aforementioned artists, Lescalleet’s music can reach moments of intensity, but is more importantly sensitive to dynamics, tone, and texture in a way that so much “noise” music is not.

Jason Lescalleet has released notable works on labels including PAN, ErstWhile, RRRecords, Intransitive, and NNA Tapes. Since 2006, he has run his own label Glistening Examples, many of whose releases have been Lescalleet’s own, including his (once monthly) This Is What I Do series. But Glistening Examples has also put out records from compatriots including Colley, Drumm, Olivia Block, Kate Carr, Retribution Body, Michael Duane Ferrell, Leo Okagawa, Renato Grieco and Francesco Tignola.

If you’re familiar with ACL, then by now I’ve dropped enough names to have piqued your interest if somehow Lescalleet hasn’t been on your radar. Perhaps not unlike John Wiese, I’ve come to take his reputation for granted only to find that his work is discussed far less than it deserves to be. I became a fan of Lescalleet’s following Songs about Nothing and Grapes and Snakes, with Aaron Dilloway, both from 2012. The following year saw the release of the beautiful organ tones of the Archaic Architecture tape, The Invisible Curse, a short mellow collab with Kevin Drumm, and the Photographs LP with Graham Lambkin, completing their trilogy. I saw Lescalleet perform at the Suoni per il Popolo festival in Montreal in 2013, so I was anticipating Much To My Demise, when it was released on Kye in 2014. That year also saw the release of Popeth, another collaborative LP with the prolific Dilloway.

By 2014 I had become a subscriber to This Is What I Do, basically an occasional studio diary CD series that Lescalleet began in 2011, but which beginning with 2014’s volume 2 ran more or less monthly through the release of volume 16 in 2015, with the most recent installment being 2019’s volume 21. I own 12 of those, little more than half the series, and it was these non-records that really made me invested in Lescalleet as an artist. The original volume from 2011 was comprised of compilation tracks and unreleased early music, but once the series was revived with volume two it had become “This is what I did at Glistening Labs during the month of …” Full length records like The Pilgrim (2006), The Breadwinner (2008), Songs about Nothing (2012), and Much To My Demise (2014) stand as cohesive finished works, but the more provisional feel of the studio diaries finds the artist stretching into less familiar territory, and there are moments on these releases (including 5, 8, and 11) that are among my favorites in his entire catalogue. (I’m sure there are many others I’m forgetting, and truly this is making me want to revisit the entire series, perhaps if this post generates a new paid subscriber or two I’ll add that to the list of bonus content down the line. Especially since many of these installments have vanished from the web.) But importantly for me, these monthly studio diaries no doubt influenced the development of my own practice. More doing, less thinking, Lescalleet’s (glistening) example inspired me to add a bit more discipline to my studio practice.

Another Example Of Parkinson's Law, as I mentioned, is a very early work, and while ultimately less captivating it remains a curious look into the formation of Lescalleet’s practice. I seem to recall an interview somewhere discussing Lescalleet’s first encounter with noise music at RRRecords in Lowell, MA in the late 90s. At the time Lescalleet was a rock fan looking to branch out, and didn’t realize that Ron Lessard’s brick-and-mortar store was a mail order hub for the global noise scene. Instead of playing record store snob, happily Lessard steered Lescalleet towards some life changing noise CDs, and then, through Lessard’s Saturday concerts held at the store, Lescalleet came to know artists like Howard Stelzer, and Greg Kelley, eventually leading to collabs with Kelley as well as with Kelley and Bhob Rainey's Nmperign. This short record hails from that era.

Across Lescalleet’s oeuvre one might sense a recurring theme of loss and decay in both subject matter and sonic materiality, an interest in diminishment that sometimes manifests in the shape of memorialization and memory. This 7” shares more with the former than the latter, seemingly an experiment in subtle manipulation of the artefacts of recording and playback. There are textures and even rhythms here that are hard to distinguish between the intended sounds and those of the record player. This seems to me to be part of the appeal to working with vinyl in this context, and perhaps something alluded to by the title.

Have other commenters on this record mistaken Parkinson’s Law for Parkinson’s Disease? Perhaps Lescalleet means to ping both references, and I think while they both make some amount of sense, the former seems more plausible and reflected in the title. Parkinson’s Law states that "Work expands to fill the available time." I interpret this as the artist filling the space available on this 7”, the available space dictating, in the form of time constraint, the structure of the work. And while both sides are minimal, they have definite shapes that play out over time, an almost gentle arc that crescendos and putters out.

I can’t find any hint of this record on YouTube and it’s not on Lescalleet’s bandcamp. It was originally released by Matthew St. Germaine’s Minneapolis DIY label Freedom From, which has been inactive for decades, save perhaps a 2020 Drainolith tape. But otherwise, nothing from Freedom From in nearly two decades and no trace of their catalogue on the web. There are a few copies are available cheap on Discogs, so go track it down if you’re interested. In the meantime, here’s a video of a live performance from 2013.