Jason Lescalleet ‎– Electronic Music (LP, grey marbled vinyl)

If the analogies of botanical classification and plant breeding are applied to the evolution and development of music and musicians then Jason Lescalleet’s niche market nursery Glistening Labs, a name that reflects its experimental agenda, has released two fascinating and promising new clones within the genus ‘Musica Electronica’ (‘ME’).
The first, with the potentially confusing name Electronic Music, is a new crossing of varieties within in the species ‘ME Lescalitus’ while the other, Combines XIX XX is a mutation of the robust ‘Beauliea-Lescalitus’ hybrid known as Due Process. The most striking, almost freakish quality of the crossing Electronic Music is how its emphasizes the differences between it’s three parent varieties, namely tape-loops, manipulation and synthesis. This aspect is at first quite disconcerting—there’s something hallucinatory about the merging of sweet sounds softened by reverb and whathaveyou with the raw, brutal sound of an untreated defective tape-loop.
The differences between these are toyed with and made ambiguous by greater or lesser degrees of manipulation but, whether it’s intrinsic to the music or a perceptual trick, the synthetic elements seem also to adopt the nature of the tape-loops—the ametric rhythms of physical tape defects and the power struggle between different sounds overwriting each other without the use of an erase head. Electronic Music thus fully retains the essential character of Lescalleet’s sound while adding a new layer of complexity.
The track called “Litmus Tape” is enthralling and it measures up the best of Jason’s past output. Its powerfully tense atmosphere is like an only half perceived, entirely alien monster lurching around; always behind you or in the periphery, unidentifiable, sinister, but curiously fascinating and, from what you can see, beautiful. If you need to ask yourself whether or not you are dreaming then, unless you are hallucinating, you probably are. The feeling of unreality that begs that question is what “Litmus Tape” brings forth like noting else I’ve heard.
The rest of the LP is consistent with that feeling in different ways. The various references found in the titles, pictures, layout and materials of this desirable LP are left as an excercise for the reader.