Jesse Perlstein is a multi-disciplinary artist born and based out of New York City. He has spent the last decade creating cross-genre works that often blend the mediums of sound, visual art, prose and interactive room installations, focusing on the confluence between fantasy and reality and exploring their inseparable tangle.
Soothing instrumental noodling
Subtle Reverie is a meditation on the way landscape and memory interact. What I like are the sound collages and keyboard drones with some ethereal vocals. Maybe the echoes sound like a great big cave sometimes. Imagine a big storm with lots of blowing water and scary wind, “Monsoon” (16:00) keyboards creep in slowly as the storm carries on, sustained tones bending and wavering as the storm fades in and out a bit. There are vocals and drones. Now the storm. Now her laugh. Now the dog. Take the soothing instrumental noodling and the talking (the segue is so smooth) “Morass” (14:11) add emerging night sounds and drones with vocal collage elements, add more word loops woven into the drone and this part gets pretty strange. Maybe this is not a cave, maybe we are in a parking garage. Both? Not always. A drone like a harmonica. Next I hear dream time night movies, an overwhelming density of sound that breaks and calms beautifully.
Abandoned Battlefields is the solo project of experimental composer Jesse Perlstein. He used his voice, field-recordings-dubbed-to-tape, OM-1 Cassette Synth and JU-06A, all going through a RC-50 loop station, with various analog f/x.
“Jesse Perlstein is a multi-disciplinary artist born and based out of New York City. He has spent the last decade creating cross-genre works that often blend the mediums of sound, visual art, prose and interactive room installations, focusing on the confluence between fantasy and reality and exploring their inseparable tangle. The surrealism of nostalgia and memory is prominently explored in Jesse’s. He is a self-professed collector of moments, or an etcher of the shadows left as they pass. Through the practice of field recording he captures and repurposes temporal ambience for compositions that include vocal accompaniment and sonic manipulation, creating surreal auditory soundscapes. These sonic tapestries are designed to be immersive and nostalgic and have been featured and composed for film, room installations, dances, performance, and in his recorded music spanning over several different projects and collaborations. Most recently, Jesse has been studying the way in which sound can be planted in rooms or spaces, composing pieces that are meant for a specific time and place, providing specific context and a method of physical immersion for the listener/audience.
“In his music practice and composition he is an experimental vocalist, focusing on instrumental music and sound collage to compose new works for film, radio and collaboration with other artists. His most prominent and acclaimed musical project to date is Sontag Shogun, an experimental trio where he uses sound collage and treated vocals to harmonize with piano (Ian Temple) and piezo’d beats and oscillator tones (Jeremy Young).”
Subtle Reverie is available Ululations. [Bandcamp]
