Glistening Examples is a cryptic, playful imprint: the slogan “Barely Evident Since 2006” runs across the case of each set. Created by Jason Lescalleet in Berwick, Maine a decade and a half ago, the label fuses an intensely personal aesthetic (“it’s not a formula, it’s my heart, my gut”) with a global range of artists and genres. One constant, running across more than 60 releases, is the mastering work of the man himself, which takes place in his basement studio, Glistening Labs. The label’s name points back to that space, while staying deliberately vague about the sounds that emerge: “Examples was a word that I used in my everyday language,” Lescalleet shrugs. “It felt unpretentious and provisional: just examples of things, not definitive.” Striking out across such vast and shifting terrain, any attempt to reach a true overview is doomed: the following cuts are just some glistening examples.

Jason Lescalleet
“The Pilgrim”
From The Pilgrim (2006)

The sound of a world ending. Prompted by the passing of the artist’s father, this was the first Glistening Examples release, and for five years remained the only title on the imprint. The physical set was a strikingly personal object, bringing together a roughly-painted vinyl picture disc and a CD, containing both spoken word (Lescalleet reading out a letter from his dad) and melancholy tape music. When the lengthy title piece was digitally reissued via Bandcamp in 2014, it was expanded even further, past the bounds of the CD format: this version, running for 85 minutes, from near-silence to roaring static, is devastating.

Grisha Shakhnes
“-”
From Leave/Trace (2013)

The first release not to feature Lescalleet as a performer, Leave/Trace also captures the moment that Glistening Examples started to become what it is today: a base for global experimental electroacoustic music. After the two artists met at a festival in Tel Aviv, Lescalleet managed to convince Shakhnes to drop his usual pseudonym (Mites) and release a disc under his own name, in the process establishing another unwritten rule for the imprint. This short track, built around a field recording of children playing in an urban park, is a bridge between a pair of harsher and louder pieces on the album: “A Man Asleep” and “A Man Aflame”. Here, the shriek of a rusty swing flitters in and out like a gestalt sketch of a duck/rabbit, one moment sounding like a naturalistic detail, the next like the wail of an overblown soprano sax.

Olivia Block
“Dissolution B”
From Dissolution (2016)

A thread that runs through a number of Glistening Examples strongest sets is the idea of fading memory and disintegrating documentary, as both field recordings and visual data fail to truly capture the essence of a physical environment. Glance at the cover of Dissolution, or better yet the bizarre LP release (clear wax, into which torn fragments of photographs are sealed like butterflies), and you get the idea. This is a haunted, disorientating disc, swirling with shortwave radio and snippets of microcassette tape.

Christian Mirande
“Leaving Mildenhall”
From Trying To Remember A House (2016)

Sticking with the idea of imagined environments, Christian Mirande’s Trying To Remember A House (released within a few weeks of Olivia Block’s set above) is a warped study of the slowly rotting buildings of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. On paper, that might sound pretty much like a standard field recording outing; in reality, it’s a hallucinatory wander through aleatory electronics (check out “Shark Watch”), chopped-up tape, and unreal spaces. On this short, dream-like track, Mirande drifts away from Pennsylvania altogether, gazing offstage towards distant Suffolk, England, as he recalls a wasted trip watching “friends ordering sandwiches at the exchange on a RAF base.”

Leo Okagawa
“Biotope Aquarium”
From The Notional Terrain (2017)

A biotope aquarium (thanks Google) is a domestic fish-tank that’s been designed using the principle of only bringing together plants, fish, and other creatures that would already coexist in a real-life geographical space. With that in mind – along with the evocative album title – Leo Okagawa’s 2017 set picks up the label’s ongoing obsession with simulated spaces. Listening to this one is like being abducted and blindfolded, while trying to hold onto breadcrumb traces of the sonic environment that is hurtling by in your imagination, dizzy acousmatic hisses giving way to roaring drones and stuttering electronics.

Kate Carr
“The Ladder is Always There”
From The Thing Itself And Not The Myth (2018)

The best Glistening Examples discs play games with the listener. They get into your head with puzzles and riddles, teasing numerical patterns and offbeat allusions. With dense thickets of morse code (both sonically and across the digipak’s artwork), fragments of poetry and alien sounds, The Thing Itself And Not The Myth is among the most mysterious of all. The recordings drift across Europe (through Scotland, France, Iceland), capturing frequencies from below the surfaces of lakes, as Carr pipes drones through synchronised swimming speakers, and her hydrophone captures the answering echoes of geese and fish.

Savvas Metaxas
“Detach 4”
From Detach (2020)

With the global lockdown of 2020, the GE aesthetic, with its combination of intense privacy and unreal environments, felt more timely than ever. “I’m already in that mindset,” Lescalleet joked to me, while discussing quarantine. “I’ve often been a bit of a hermit, and I think a lot of people who like this kind of music are also hermits.” The first release on the label to explicitly respond to the pandemic, Savvas Metaxas’s intricate electronic album was recorded through headphones as the artist worked through the hush that had descended upon his neighbourhood. “I enjoyed the mix with the few sounds coming from outside my studio,” he explains. “The result felt almost like a microscopic part of this social quietness.”

Jason Lescalleet
“Under The Bridge”
From The Feckless Dreamer (2020)

The second of his two contributions to Jon Abbey’s AMPLIFY: quarantine online festival, The Feckless Dreamer caught Lescalleet venturing out of his studio and into the woods of Berwick. The Salmon Falls river can be heard cascading through the disc’s first half, but on this second track it’s threatened by the intermittent growl of traffic, rushing over a concrete bridge (or is that a blast of thunder?). In many ways, this is the simplest field recording the artist has ever put out: just a microphone and a semi-rural space. With its cluster of allusions and riddles, though, from the duration’s time-code (11:11 crops up across dozens of Lescalleet’s projects) to the sly, undelivered promise of a Red Hot Chili Peppers cover, “Under The Bridge” maps the full range of his interests. And, way back in May 2020, it was useful too: for me, this was field recording as teleportation, smuggling me out of lockdown and onto the banks of a river I’d never known.

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