Jan Jelinek^DE

A transformer of lost and found sounds, Jelinek turns rare musical samples and field recordings into distinctly absorbing, complexly textured abstract creations. An artist of collage and processing, he remains on a conceptual quest for sonic interrelation and metamorphosis, navigating through art-house-house to dulcet experimental sound designed narratives which can be heard across a body of work going back more than 20 years.

Jelinek began making laptop house rhythms under the moniker Farben in the late-'90s, striking a transcendent balance between his clicks + cuts style and detailed, ultra-sampled ambient, jazzified techno under his own name. In the past two years, Jelinek reissued his beloved, 2001 melodic glitch-club album Loop-finding-jazz-records—on which he boiled rare jazz samples into percussive static and rippling house grooves using an ASR10 sampler. The restless musical inclinations that followed lead him to scribble outside the strict grid of purely beat-oriented electronic music—he invented fictitious backing band The Exposures, delved into psychedelic alt-rock with Kosmischer Pitch, taking an actual live band on the tour, improvised and remixed Australian post-jazz group Triosk, made sequencer-free music, rounded back to samplings of symphonies and news clips, and even let the city of L.A. inspire a hazy collage. To house his prolific imagination, Jelinek launched the Faitiche label in 2008 and released the ‘faux-storical’ 1969-1988 recordings of his creation, Ursula Bogner. He’s since released over a dozen more exploratory albums on the label and collaborated with musicians including fellow Berlin sampler Andrew Pekler, Swedish free jazz drummer Sven-Åke Johansson, Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita and Japanese drone artist ASUNA.

Jelinek presents the live iteration of Zwischen (“between”) at this year’s festival, which began life as a radio play for German broadcaster SWR2. Each of its pieces focuses on an interview with a public figure, excerpting the non-verbal noises and the spaces between words, including laughter and almost imperceptible breathing. Through software synthesis, the samples generate ambient electronic tones, blips and clicks that overlay and merge with the original voices to make new sound structures and narratives.