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German composer
Jan Jelinek blended jazz/funk bass lines (lifted from old records), ripetitive minimalism, glitch music, trip-hop and house music on the groundbreaking
Loop Finding Jazz Records (Scape, 2001).
The overture, the glitch-tinged Moire - Piano & Organ (6:54), is typical of his method of patiently weaving a delicate atmosphere out of simple processes of iteration.
Moire - Strings (6:28) is a floating remix of glitches and drones.
Rock In The Video Age (8:04) goes beyond the atmosphere and lands onto
the dancefloor: the process creates an organic, swinging, quasi-Brazilian beat.
They Them (7:20) is even more lively, like a melody from a movie soundtrack of the Sixties, hardly related to jazz at all.
Them Their (5:06) sounds like a gently dissonant of the same melody.
The glitch is the rhythm in Tendency (7:22), that returns to a more
subliminal atmosphere, and Do Dekor (5:38), that returns to a more
jovial beat.
The background of musique concrete is what elevates the feeble vibration of Drift (5:09) to a work of abstract art.
The specific plot changes from track to track, but the level of sophistication
is always stunning given the modest means at his disposal.
The albums that followed were less brilliant versions of the same concept:
Improvisations And Edits (Soup-Disk, 2002),
1+3+1 (Scape, 2003),
and the mediocre La Nouvelle Pauvrete (Scape, 2003).
Jelinek evolved towards a more luxuriant (less glitchy) form of electronic music with
Kosmischer Pitch (scape, 2005), that, despite the title, has little in
common with the "cosmic music" of the 1970s (the title refers to the fact that
the sources are lifted from German rock records of the 1970s instead of jazz
records),
The fundamental principle was still one of slow variation within repetition,
and the implementation was even more elegant.
The highlight of the album is the last piece, the eight-minute Morphing Leadgitarre Rckw„rts, a refracted electronic phrase disturbed by a ticking/plucking sound.
Universal Band Silhouette (7:06) slowly mutates from a sparse beginning
to a dense looping texture.
Lemminge Und Lurchen Inc (3:50) juxtaposes a repetitive electronic noise and gamelan-like percussion
Im Diskodickicht (5:22) rediscovers rhythm as a product of robotic
metronomy in a jungle of mechanical noises.
Vibraphonspulen (5:39) is a carillon of disorienting timbres.
Industrial noises create an intricate polyrhythmic lattice in
Lithiummelodie 1 (6:57).
A jazzy feeling resurfaces in the fractured swing of Western Mimikry (3:07).
In the six pieces of Tierbeobachtungen (Scape, 2006) the beat had all
but disappeared, replaced by the rhythms of the loops that permeated the
compositions.
The loop was, in fact, the main compositional tool employed by Jelinek.
A Concert For Television (8:03) is de facto a concerto of musique
concrete, mixing what sounds like church bells and a small crowd of whining
synthesizers.
Palmen Aus Leder (7:12) is unusually disquieting for his relatively
mellow standards: there is something terrible and subhuman about the looping
sounds, like post-nuclear monsters scouring the ruins for signs of life.
The Ballad Of Soap. Und: Die GEMA Nimmt Kontakt Auf (7:43)
is also eerie, in that it sounds
like a blues from a otherworldly place and a future age.
Another magical act of transformation, Happening Tone (7:12) slowly configures itself as an electronic poem reflecting on the Indian raga.
Compared with previous works,
the harsh Up To My Same Old Trick Again (6:39)
and the ethereal Tierbeobachtung (6:01) also display a edgier
semantics.
This album is perhaps Jelinek's most varied and exuberant work.
Jelinek is also active as Farben (microhouse) and Gramm (minimal techno).
Gesellschaft Zur Emanzipation Des Samples (or Society For The Emancipation Of Samples) is a project by Jelinek that constructed
Circulations (Faitiche, 2009) out of copyrighted sounds played in
public spaces.
Jelinek also concocted the fictitious story of an
early synthesizer experimenter, Ursula Bogner,
who died in 1994, and collected her vintage recordings on
Recordings 1969-1988 (Faitiche, 2009),
the single Pluto Hat Einen Mond (Mass Media Verlag)
and Sonne = Black Box (Faitiche, 2011).
The contemplative ambient music of Bird Lake Objects (Faitiche, 2010) was the result of a collaboration between Jan Jelinek and Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita. Far from static, the nine-minute Undercurrent undergoes
all sorts of gentle transformations, like the surface of a pond at sunset,
and then suddenly an abrasive noise soars above the surface and buries
the music.
Workshop For Modernity is a swarm of insects playing with chimes.
The eight-minute I'll Change Your Life is subliminal brain waves
of deep sleep.
The seven-minute Waltz is an aquatic dance jam for fairy creatures.
The experiment was continued six years later on the less ambitious
Schaum (Faitiche, 2016) but here the music is limited to impressionistic
vignettes that mix minimalist repetition and cosmic droning
(Cin) or imagine alien soundscapes populated by robotic ducks
(Helio) or intone dissonant industrial songs (What you should Know about me) or document ghostly conversations with the otherworld (Botuto).
The nine-minute Parades is a slow transcendental plunge into the
hidden geometry of a crystal.
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