(Musique concrète, Electroacoustic, Field Recordings, l. Erstwhile Records) [CD] Graham Lambkin & Jason Lescalleet - The Breadwinner - 2008, FLAC (tracks+.cue), lossless

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Graham Lambkin & Jason Lescalleet / The Breadwinner
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TITLE "The Breadwinner"
PERFORMER "Graham Lambkin & Jason Lescalleet"
REM GENRE "Avant Garde"
REM DATE "2008"
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• Graham Lambkin/Jason Lescalleet microphone, tapes, Casio SK-5

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• Graham Lambkin and Jason Lescalleet are both highly respected artists, with small but intensely hardcore followings. Since 2001, they've been gradually moving closer towards realizing a collaborative project, and "The Breadwinner" is the results of two years of recording, reworking and polishing.

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  Lambkin first entered the public consciousness at 19 when he formed his band The Shadow Ring, in Folkestone, a small town in Kent, England. The band was memorable and built an rabidly passionate fan base because of its sui generis approach, blending elements of folk, noise, cracked electronics, and surrealist poetry, while radically changing the overall formula with each release. A decade of increasingly skewed and inspired work culminated in 2003's I'm Some Songs, constructed long distance as Lambkin had relocated to the US in 1998. Over the last few years, Lambkin has primarily worked under his own name, most notably with 2007's brilliant Salmon Run, a precursor to "The Breadwinner".

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  Lescalleet has gradually and painstakingly built a compelling discography over the past decade. He uses reel-to-reel tape decks to explore the textures of low fidelity analog sounds and the natural phenomena of old tape and obsolete technology. He is one of a growing list of master producer/musicians, whose skill lies as much in reworking, assembling and mastering the material available as in creating it (or helping create it) in the first place. He has worked with such wide-ranging artists as Ron Lessard, Joe Colley and Phill Niblock, and has released a string of superb solo discs in Mattresslessness (Cut), Electronic Music (RRR) and The Pilgrim (Glistening Examples). This is his second release for Erstwhile, after 2001's Forlorn Green (w/Greg Kelley), and his third is already in preparation, a duo with Bhob Rainey, planned for release in early 2009.

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  The material for The Breadwinner was recorded at Lambkin's house in upstate NY, over two recording sessions. The duo treated the entire building and its surrounding grounds as a studio, welcoming in outside sounds, which were later kept or eliminated as they felt appropriate. The subtitle on the front cover is "musical settings for common environments and domestic situations", layering numerous submerged fragments to find beauty in everyday life.

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  "Jason Lescalleet's influence was palpably present long before the average Joe knew how many L's were in his last name (or could successfully google it). He spun tape loops with nmperign from the get-go, frequently signified the endings of his characteristically foundation-shaking performances by hurling a nearly indestructible, hundred-pound Peavy amp across the stage, and provided the bulk of the "disaster" in legendary drummer Laurence Cook's "Disaster Unit 2000". But as the smoke cleared and the Peavy met its demise in a white-walled room, it became apparent to an awful lot of people that Lescalleet was making some amazing music; beautifully constructed symphonies of decay born of an intimacy with items and ideas lesser minds might discard: tape machines, lo-bit samplers, the tedium of everyday life. His ability to evoke powerfully complex emotional experiences from such muck made a collaboration with Graham Lambkin practically inevitable.

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  Composer Walter Marchetti once made a statement to the effect that he was seeking to reach the "bottom" of music. Some more diligent attention to this task might lead him to the music of Graham Lambkin. Already marking out a glorious bottom with his former band, The Shadow Ring, Lambkin has pursued a music so removed from prescribed aesthetics that one is flooded by the beauty it seems to ruthlessly avoid. He puts the mundane to tape and carves out its horror, its sweetness, and its unsettling ambivalence. Shrouded in a disarming naivet, the music leaves the listener ill-prepared for its very adult take on being-in-the-world. We are fortunate that humor can be so black, that we may surrender happily and willingly to an experience not many artists are willing or capable of delivering."
  -Bhob Rainey

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• Graham Lambkin
  Born: United Kingdom
  Currently: New York, NY, United States
  Member of: The Cat & Bells Club, Elklink, Footprint, Klaus Canterbury & the Aces, The Shadow Ring, Tart, Transmission
  Genres: Musique concrète, Electroacoustic, Sound Collage, Tape Music

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• Jason Lescalleet
  Born: 1968, Worcester, MA, United States
  Currently: Berwick, ME, United States
  Member of: Due Process
  Genres: Musique concrète, EAI, Drone, Electroacoustic, Noise, Tape Music

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• Tiny Mix Tapes:

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• Scott Foust -- musician, philosopher, aesthete, owner of Swill Radio -- wrote a manifesto on behalf of "The Anti-Naturals" in which he chastises hyper-capitalism and champions the political implications of aesthetic thought. Rather than labeling aesthetics as symptomatic of capitalism (a relation made obvious when choosing one product over another because it's "cuter"), Foust believes that aesthetics can be reasserted as a critique of capitalism. He considers the artificial and the construction of self/society as something positive, while ideas of "authenticity" or the state of being "natural" are like carrot-dangling, basically an attempt to get consumers to keep buying shit and perpetuate capitalism. You could be that lucky one who hits the jackpot or becomes a millionaire! But probably not. Foust instead argues for a "total aestheticization" that acts as critical insight for all of life -- that is, if I'm reading it correctly, to depict all of life in an idealized or artistic manner so as to celebrate social and cultural constructions rather than passively accept or ironically dismiss them.
• Having worked with Graham Lambkin on various projects (Tart, Elklink, The Shadow Ring), Foust considers Lambkin an "Anti-Natural" artist. Although Lambkin claimed not to understand Foust's theories in an interview with Steve Kobak (on which this review relies heavily), there are similarities that he and, by extension, Jason Lescalleet share with it. In fact, if there's one overriding theme to The Breadwinner, the duo's collaborative debut, it's the aestheticization of domesticity. Aside from the title itself being a reference to the home, the album consists entirely of sounds from Lambkin's flat -- the radiator, the creaks in the floor, the silence/noise of the various rooms/hallways, the neighbors talking through the wall -- all edited down to roughly 50 minutes from eight hours of tape. According to the interview:
• Even outside acoustic events found their way to the duo’s recording regimen, as the pair fed the sounds inside to an internal recording system and slowed their pace to a crawl. Sometimes the pair overdubbed noises on a never-ending tape loop, recording themselves while playing the tape back and layering audio until it became a sonic blur. At one point, Lescalleet brought old reel-to-reel machines to Lambkin’s house and the pair ran tape from room to room.
  Lambkin and Lescalleet are editors of the best variety, so recording sound was only half the story. Through tape manipulation and various editing techniques, The Breadwinner falls even closer in line with The Anti-Naturals theory by appropriating the mundane (for aesthetic reasons, of course). The result sounds like an inadvertent exploration of dislocation and displacement, much differently than musique conrte and minimalist compositions or the real-time experiments of, say, nmperign or Sunn O))). It's actually most similar in spirit to Lambkin's work from last year, Salmon Run, but while that album saw him invading public-domain classical works in a concise, direct way, most everything on The Breadwinner feels a little off and uneasy, a little smeared. Even Lambkin's own invasions this time around -- on "Listen, The Snow Is Falling" and "Lucy Song" -- are either more timid or directed at himself. It sounds simultaneously like self-parody, pastiche, and compromise, but it's all the better because of this.
• On the other hand, Lambkin and Lescalleet seem to share a similar sense of dynamics and variety. In fact, The Breadwinner is precisely the type of album one would expect from a collaboration between these two. It may not be as exacting and colorful as Lescalleet's wonderful solo album, Mattresslessness (in which silence, pacing, and color play larger roles than heard here), but it has a similar construction that blurs the distinction between treated and non-treated sounds. Furthermore, both artists also seem to acknowledge the recording equipment as vital elements in the overall presentation of the music. The quality of a Dictaphone or Casio SK-5 (a sampling keyboard used for the album) will certainly have a different quality than a standard Shure condenser mic. This isn't about clarity or fidelity, and Lambkin and Lescalleet not only acknowledge this, but subsume it.
• With an album as seemingly dense as The Breadwinner, it's easy to read into superficial aspects, like the connections to composer Robert Ashley (the album cover is an homage to the LP version of Ashley's Private Parts) or how the album's subtitle reads "musical settings for common environments and domestic situations" (note the "for" instead of "from"). But there's really no single epiphany here, nothing really to "get," no crucial subtext to be discovered. Instead, it's just about finding appreciation in sound and sound construction, even with few narrative qualities or emotional signifiers to grasp. It's about vicariously living in Lambkin's permutated apartment through the sounds, placing yourself in a restless context to which you can either give in or analyze. The former may provide the temporary release that could very well expand your aesthetic tastes, while the latter will likely get your head in critique mode. In both cases, you'd be that much closer to The Anti-Naturals.

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• Graham Lambkin: microphone, tapes, synthesizer, recording engineer, producer
• Jason Lescalleet: microphone, tapes, synthesizer, recording engineer, producer

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