Jason Arigato - Jason B. Sad LP

An E major chord knocks. Jason's echological sonography begins. I stand in the sound curve like a breakwater in the ocean of frequencies. With my legs slightly bent, my upper body bent forward, my head between the speakers. Beforehand, I synchronized the small loudness wheel with the large volume wheel on the sound system and leveled it at level seven. Precautions had to be taken to really capture Jason Be Sad / Jason Be Glad, to be captured by the music - stereophony is instrumental in these recordings. It's the sum that counts, heard in isolation, coming from two channels. That leaves something for the head to do. It slowly finds itself in an intimate space of experience, soon opening up as a quietly believed youth room, soon transforming into the vibrating fabric of the decades. I hear constants: Waves of fear in the dormitory, love in the reading room. Inaccessible, as if in a distant galaxy, the librarian's class. Two exits, infinite intoxication on the left, finite death on the right.

Finally, this record tells of isolation. Not of "loneliness/loneliness", that romanticized, stylized mystification of isolation, which can be heard in the canonized repertoire of all popular music. Jason Arigato does not negotiate this "loneliness". No, what I hear here is isolation of youth ... and techniques of its overcoming, bridging. Attempts to connect in the echo of a re-connection. Here it is taken existentialistically seriously, the class of youth, its isolation from the world. I remember the warm air in the yellow telephone booths, leafing through the thousand-page telephone directories of a city. Of trying to get an extra round with the right combination of coins. Of telephone pranks with late-life retirees and prophetic librarians. And the expectant hope for the revelation of an interplanetary dimension by means of jerky stimulation of the dial of the mouse-grey house telephone. Deliberate wrong operation of the apparatus. The intrusion into alien long-distance conversations, the voices barely audible, drowned out by whispering and whistling. Quite similar to the ghost voices on the long waves of the outermost fringes of radio.

This world lost in the distant past is what I hear in Jason's record. And the elementary school with the ghost and war stories of Mr. Feldmann. The class teacher, grayed like a beatnik in a suit, told us children about the existence of telepathic forces and universal connections using the example of a navy experiment with wolf mothers and their pups: above a certain diving depth, radio communication between the submarine and the mainland was no longer possible, but if one made sure that the pups in the boat were not well, the mother on land showed a clear reaction that corresponded exactly in time. I don't know if this story is true, but now, listening to this record, it comes back to my mind. And I think that's what Jason's Stereophony is all about: creating isolation, bringing it together in wave form, breaking the isolation. A space age voodoo simulation.

Federico Sanchez