The glitch has become so familiar that we rarely hear it for what it is: the audible trace of an error, a scab grown across a damaged set of data. Purposeful glitches proliferate in popular music, where they now constitute just one more utensil in a producer’s digital toolbox. You can hear them in Skrillex, Kanye, even Bon Iver and Low. The 17-year-old pop savant Billie Eilish, who currently has 14 songs on the Billboard Hot 100, has made her name with an ASMR-pricked sound that fizzes like seltzer, fueled by a seemingly inexhaustible supply of the crinkly sonics that, years before her birth, were the exclusive property of scowling avant-techno purists.
Back around the turn of the millennium, to craft music out of such scratchy, accidental sounds was novel. Oval’s Markus Popp is the most famous example of the phenomenon, for the way he turned the clicks and pops of skipping CDs into a meditative strain of ambient music. No less important was Jan Jelinek, who on his 2001 album Loop-finding-jazz-records utilized his sampler’s looping function to whip snippets of old jazz and soul records into crackly abstractions, chords turning cloudy over beats that bristled like porcupine quills. A new reissue of Jelinek’s Personal Rock, recorded under his Gramm alias, nudges us back two years earlier, when the German electronic musician’s tools were rustier, his loops lumpier, yet his vision for a transcendent music of digital failure—sifting through the rubble of 1s and 0s and coming up with fistfuls of opals—was very much intact.
Gramm was not Jelinek’s first project; the year before Personal Rock, he put out a pair of 12"s as Farben, an alias he continued to use sporadically until the early 2010s. Farben is German for “colors,” yet those initial records were resolutely greyscale, all shadow and pinprick. The monochrome palette persists on the Gramm album, but there’s a newfound richness to his tones; each track tends to be illuminated by a chord, or set of chords, that glows dully in the muck, deep hued against a dull backdrop, in the fashion of a Rothko painting.
Farben was grounded in the tropes and rituals of dance music: The records appeared on Klang Elektronik, a Frankfurt label known for rave-tested fare from artists like Acid Jesus, and the earliest material fleshed out its clicks and whirrs with the muscular sounds of classic drum machines. But with Personal Rock, Jelinek mostly left the nightclub behind, if not always intentionally. (“Often I’d get booked to play in clubs at peak time and it didn’t work at all,” he admitted to The Wire in 2012.) The sounds here are wispier, the beats more haphazard, the arrangements more or less indifferent to the demands of the dancing body.
Gramm is still situated within dance music’s broader traditions. Opener “Legends/Nugroove TM” references an iconic New York house label, and it’s a good bet that “St. Moritz” is a nod to Berlin’s Moritz von Oswald, of Basic Channel, Maurizio, Chain Reaction, et al.—a titan of minimal techno, without whose Spartan example Jelinek might never have carved out his own stripped-back lane. And occasionally, Gramm thumps away with abandon: “Ment,” streaked with a backwards tone that recalls the pre-Kompakt label Profan, surges ahead on a powerful, swift-moving kick drum. But the functionalism of the working DJ is clearly far from Jelinek’s mind. Personal Rock’s tempos are often slow, the percussion reduced to a sliver of light dissolving against a velvety backdrop. The central chord of “Siemens.Bioport” just hovers in space, an ill-formed blob against a beat composed of dust mites and fingernail clippings; the beat in “70gr” moves like a Roomba, bouncing from corner to corner as its intake valves choke on lint.
Perhaps most striking about Personal Rock, listening back after 20 years, is how lo-fi it sounds today. There’s a reason for that: The rudimentary gear Jelinek used didn’t allow for much in the way of fidelity. But that muddy quality is a far cry from the way this stuff was presented at the time, when glitch techno tended to be hailed as a harbinger of a brave new future. In retrospect, Jelinek’s debut album has almost as much in common with the burned-out shoegaze of a band like Flying Saucer Attack as it does the lab-coated discipline of Berlin’s Raster-Noton or the laser-like repetitions of Oval. Jelinek’s work on Personal Rock is murky, moody, and, above all, expressive in a way we don’t often expect of this era of electronic music. Where minimal techno was often noted for its rigidity, the rhythms on “Type Zwei,” the album’s standout track, recall Can’s Jaki Liebezeit in their liquid grace. Zero in on the movements of Jelinek’s shape-shifting glitches, and the drab specter of silicon falls by the wayside; instead, you might hear crickets, windshield wipers, lawn sprinklers. Like a lot of art lurking in the shadow of Y2K, glitch techno was often assumed to be cold and overly intellectualized—all head, no hips—but Personal Rock is a reminder of how soulful the era’s digital music could be.
