Listening Notes #003: Jan Jelinek

Misha Lepetic
Jul 10, 2017 · 10 min read

Brief, incomplete and biased thoughts on musicians whose discographies have been occupying a lot of my listening time. Not meant to be authoritative, except for when it is. Prefatory remarks here.

One of the great pleasures of listening through an artist’s entire discography is tracing an evolution that might at first seem surprising, but in retrospect seems natural, if not inevitable. I suppose that we can chalk this up to our innate preference for patterns even when there are none. Nevertheless, there is a certain thrill when a musician really hits their stride — when they discover the sonic vocabulary with which they’re most expressive, find the right partners, and carve out their own space within, or between, genres. In a nutshell, this seems to have been Berlin-based Jan Jelinek’s career so far.

Jelinek’s beginnings are solid enough but ultimately unremarkable. His debut 2001 LP, ‘Loop-finding-jazz-records’, takes the snap-crackle-pop ambient pioneered by Stefan Betke’s Pole project from a few years earlier and infuses it with a little more swing — not surprising, if you consider that it appeared on Betke’s label, ~scape. While some of Jelinek’s tracks exhibit a light four-on-the-floor touch, most are squarely within the noodly, static- and reverb-soaked style that Pole and many others would bring to more-or-less complete expression around that time.

Jelinek’s effort is thoroughly competent and has enough individuality to make it a keeper; additionally, its spacious qualities make it a pleasure to mix. But the thing with this style of IDM — as well as related genres like dub techno and ambient techno — is that it’s difficult, as a composer, to say more than what has already been said by each genre’s originating creative forces. Although I’m a casual traveler through these waters, dub techno and ambient techno have always struck me as forms that were fully and satisfactorily explored fairly soon after they initially manifested. Consider Basic Channel’s early work, such as 1994’s ‘Quadrant Dub’ single, and compare it to the material on contemporary podcasts such as Phonons. Or the sort of stuff that Deepchord began putting out in 2000, versus the material that artists like Martin Stürtzer have been reliably issuing in more recent years. Of course, the sounds are more refined and the production quality is much more elevated, but the fundamental conceits have gone unchanged.

The same holds true for much of IDM, especially the ‘breakfast cereal’ (snap-crackle-pop) variety. I’m sure that aficionados of these genres will be hopping mad at these oversimplifications, but let me conclude this brief aside with two points: for a DJ, the static nature of a genre may not matter that much. We aren’t bound to any one genre, anyway, so a certain amount of consistency is not unwelcome. Also, a degree of homogeneity sharpens one’s ears and makes you pay attention to the details that make a few tracks stand out from the many. This is simply good listening practice. It’s up to each listener and practitioner to establish for themselves the point at which they hit diminishing returns. At the same time, I don’t intend to make a purely relativistic argument either — there is still such a thing as bad music, whether it is badly made, boring to listen to, or simply irritating.


Returning to Jelinek’s debut, I should add that it already hints at a more diverse potential. I’m thinking specifically of ‘Do Dekor’, the LP’s penultimate track. The electric piano figure, with its heavily portamento’d sound, gives the piece a sinuous flair that helps it rise above the standard IDM fare. Intriguingly, the same figure also alludes to sounds favored by 1980s Japanese minimalism, the relevance of which will become apparent later on.

Jelinek has also harbored a long-standing love of jazz, and this provides a welcome counterpoint to the glitch-pop paradigm, which can easily devolve into remote and sterile navel-gazing. Crackles and micro-edits can alienate as much as invite a listener into closer listening, so the intimation of a groove can benefit a composition greatly. This — and Jelinek’s appetite for collaboration — is made evident on ‘Straight Life’, the lead track on his 2002 joint effort with Japanese collective Computer Soup, ‘Improvisations And Edits Tokyo, 09/26/2001’. In this track, the group’s swirl of sound is gently held together by a tame but pleasing muted trumpet improvising throughout.

This impression is further solidified through a solo effort (billed as another collaboration, although that seems to be a headfake) called ‘La Nouvelle Pauvreté’. Dark, jazz-infused grooves get fattened up by the liberal application of gentle white noise, record pops and other sonic artefacts abducted from IDM-land. Sometimes the final form can take on a restrained house music feel, whereas other times, as with ‘There Are Other Worlds (They Have Not Told You Of)’, the music acquires a drifting, ambiguous presence that seeks to escape the beat as much as hew to it.

In these earlier works, as well as a third collaboration, with the jazz trio Triosk, it’s apparent that Jelinek is that rare artist who can work well with ensembles (even if it’s a pretend ensemble, like The Exposures). At first glance, his work may recall Eno’s role as a producer, but Jelinek enmeshes himself much more deeply into the groups he has worked with. Throw in the improvisatory nature of many of the compositions, and one begins to appreciate how the unique sensibilities that each party brings to the table are augmented and contrasted, as ideas and motifs jostle each other for attention.


Returning to solo work, Jelinek makes a more patchy offering in 2005’s ‘Kosmischer Pitch’. There isn’t as much evolution in the individual tracks, but there are some standouts worth mentioning. As with his previous LPs, electric pianos and especially vibraphones mark a sustained presence in ‘Vibraphonspulen’, and the desultory waltz-like feel of ‘Western Mimikry’ provides a welcome example of a time signature that doesn’t often crop up in electronic music. Jelinek’s trademark organic feeling is never far off, however: the closing track, ‘Morphing Leadgitarre Rückwärts’, has a languid, rotational quality, and a gently lapping nature that brings to mind Eno and Fripp’s collaborations from the days of ‘Evening Star’. Jelinek also pulls one of those ‘seven minutes of silence’ tricks before ending the album on a brief but very satisfying solo synthesizer coda.

The following year, ‘Tierbeobachtungen’ continues Jelinek’s newfound penchant for introspection. These are better understood as set pieces that acquire charm as layers get added over time, but they lack the narrative drive that characterize much of his previous work, especially within a collaborative context. Jelinek is exploring more instrumental textures, too, and while the loop-based nature of the music is undeniably prominent, we have come a long way from the standard ‘breakfast cereal’ approach of filling out a tonal palette. In fact, some of these pieces remind me more of work done by ‘post-rock’ bands such as Tortoise in the mid-1990s, than of anything purely electronic, partly because ‘Tierbeobachtungen’ begins to feature more diverse noise sources, such as guitar feedback. Loops arc and slowly return to the saturated muck from which they were born, awaiting their next reincarnation. There is a placid feel to the proceedings, as if fireflies were winking over a twilight lawn; despite the lack of development, this is not unpleasant. (‘HUB Tierbeobachtungen’, a version of the album featuring live remixes by Pole, Thomas Fehlmann and others, is also worth a detour).


Let’s gather up the threads we’ve found so far: a searching musical mind who rather quickly transcended the genre that served as his proving ground, who also tends to play well with others, while further exploring and developing his solo work, all with a penchant for relying on live performance to capture compelling musical moments. It seems to me that Jelinek is just looking for his soulmate.

In this vein, 2010’s ‘Bird, Lake, Objects’ marked the first collaboration between Jelinek and Japanese percussionist Masayoshi Fujita. Fujita plays prepared vibraphone, which is a perfect fit for Jelinek, whose electronic textures were already seeking out the company of sustained tones, as was the case with electric piano in some of his previous collaborations. However, it’s the prepared nature of Fujita’s vibraphone that gives both artists a tremendous amount of interface to one another. The soft swell of ‘Undercurrent’, gradually occupies more and more of your psychoacoustic field, until it yields to the swaying rhythms that bumble against one another to form ‘Workshop For Modernity’. In ‘I’ll Change Your Life’, Fujita’s contemplative solo over Jelinek’s slow-bobbing bass lines is almost conventional, if it didn’t express such a thoughtful intimacy with the listener. On ‘Stripped to RM’ Jelinek takes a firm grasp of Fujita’s vibraphone, using it as source material for a jumpy, tremulous composition. This is the closest Jelinek gets to his old IDM roots, but all the hard edges have been lovingly sanded down and polished to a warm glow.

‘Bird, Lake, Objects’ makes it immediately clear that here are two artists who not only complement but greatly augment one another. It’s fortunate for us that they’ve kept going: the injection of Fujita’s minimalist sensibility makes the perfect foil for Jelinek’s rich and restless timbres. Following the release of ‘Bird, Lake, Objects’, their collaboration continued with live appearances (you can get a look at Fujita’s prepared vibraphone and the rest of their setup at one of these live gigs, for example at Berlin’s 2014 Letratone Fesitval). Several of these performances are captured on the 2013 EP ‘Do You Know Otahiti?’ along with other unreleased material.

But it’s really their latest LP, 2016’s ‘Schaum’, that shines brightest. Fujita and Jelinek seem to have acquired enough confidence as performers and collaborators that they step down from pure abstraction and pursue soundscapes that evoke forests, as evidenced by the first two tracks of ‘Schaum’. But there’s also a deepened sense of play, as in ‘Urub’, where Fujita noodles around with his prepared percussion on top of Jelinek’s gentle ostinati — as if an inventor were turning over tools on his workbench to find the right one. ‘Botuto’, on the other hand, takes snatches of what sound like jazz orchestra samples and mash them into a soft paste garnished by Fujita’s spare vibes playing. At 84bpm, it’s exactly the sort of background over which I could lay some DJ Krush, or other roomy, snare-driven downtempo. Even better is the clave-referencing ‘LesLang’— a vaguely tropical groove that by its end gets broken down, deconstructed and sold for parts: a great example of how Jelinek and Fujita can craft a tight composition that shifts its character both radically and smoothly. Finally, the outbound track, ‘Parades’, is reminiscent of the previous LP’s ‘Undercurrents’, but its sheer buoyancy and placement as the closing number leaves the listener on a high note.


There’s a lot more to be said about Jelinek’s sonic explorations that fall outside of this somewhat pat narrative that I’ve constructed. For example, there are his more avant-garde explorations of cut-up technique, mostly executed under the moniker ‘G.E.S’ (see ‘Circulations’ and ‘More Circulations’, which takes orchestral music and field recordings as its source material). There is also a flirtation with evoking much older-sounding, modular synthesizer-style constructions, hinted at the close of the third track of ‘Tierbeobachtungen’, ‘The Ballad Of Soap Und: Die GEMA Nimmt Kontakt Auf’; in ‘Helmut Schmidt Plays Bach’ (from 2013’s ‘Temple’ EP); and especially in ‘Music & Birds’. Furthermore, there are even Cage-like pastiches in 2012’s ‘PrimeTime’, although the inclusion of so much political speech is not a great personal preference of mine. Especially with the reversion to unadorned modular synth sounds, Jelinek is essentially taking us on a Benjamin Button-like tour of electronic music history — when he started, it was at the cutting edge of micro-edited electronica, and 15 years later, he is keeping good company with the pioneers of the 1950s and 1960s, like Joe Meek and Morton Subotnick.

Finally, it shouldn’t go unmentioned that Jelinek reveals a streak of mischief with perhaps the greatest anti-artifact anyone has yet come up with in the music business:

USB concrete cube (“Temple”, size: 31 cm x 31 cm x 31 cm, weight: 70 kg) containing the WAV files of Jelinek’s compilation (Faitiche8–11). The Temple concrete cube is contra-intuitive, defying the demands made of contemporary sound carriers. Decidedly not portable, it is in fact monumentally bound to location. The material manifestation of the audio files is strictly functional, containing neither additional information nor decoration. Only the front side is adorned with a protruding USB port that allows access to the data within. Data and carrier are connected permanently — readable and copyable, but not yet deletable. Information and medium are reconciled. The data contained herein is freely accessible to all. The only requirements are physical presence at the cube’s location and a computer with a USB port (USB 1 & 2 compatible) that can be inserted into the cube. It is planned for “Temple” to be set up at a series of public spaces.

There’s physical media, and then there’s monumentally physical media. I especially like the idea that the music is free, so long as you can reach its physical location. And it’s made even stranger by the fact that, as time goes on, Jelinek’s (and Fujita’s) music becomes as light as a feather.

Misha Lepetic

Written by

I’m all stacked up over LaGuardia and I ain’t coming down for anyone, not even you.

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