There's a tendency with Jan Jelinek to lean on record titles and release notes for clues about the content of his music. As his latest is called Tierbeobachtungen, German for "animal observations," some have been hearing an "animal like" quality in these tracks. And as he's said that he recorded these tracks in various locations while between studios, others are hearing something restless and displaced.
It's an understandable tendency with projects as abstract and focused on pure sound as Jelinek's, to search for a concept around which to orient the music. And perhaps there's something to these ideas. But I'm hearing a record that continues very much in the vein of last year's Kosmischer Pitch, Jelinek's subtle (almost subliminal) homage to Krautrock, with a couple of noticeable differences.
Like his last record, Tierbeobachtungen discards the sleek, gleaming microsound detail of Jelinek's earlier work for oddly cut loops of creaky old instruments like guitar and organ. Whatever the sound sources-- whether the instruments were recorded live or sampled-- the grainy distortion of the recording is highlighted and the almost imperceptible air of the room is preserved. This is warm, loose, fuzzy music; in its unfussiness it's almost the exact opposite of the perfectionism Jelinek exhibited when he first came on the scene.
But where Kosmischer Pitch still made judicious use of beats, *Tierbeobachtungen * drifts untethered, the rhythms created only by the overlapping loops that are, for the moment, his sole mode of composition. Though Jelinek is still presumably working with software, his music presently bears a sharp resemblance to that of turntable artist Philip Jeck, minus the disembodied voices the latter usually cycles into his loops. Both the duration and quality of Jelinek's base segments have the sense of skipping vinyl. Most tracks consist of a half-dozen or so fragments ranging from a couple seconds to almost 10, which are set in motion, played off of each other, and tweaked in the mix.
The effect is both static and oddly propulsive, with swells of sound shoving the tracks toward something even as everything seems to be simultaneously spinning in place. The tension between movement and stasis is the most enticing thing about Tierbeobachtungen, creating a sort of woozy, disorienting headspace that winds up being psychedelic and more than a little heavy, despite the absence of extreme dynamic range or noise. The music is hypnotic and meditative but also quietly unsettling and sometimes even a little creepy.
At this point Jelinek's preference for widely variable "head" music-- even in his dance work, people talked more about texture than swing-- may well be his defining characteristic. He's not interested in drama, narrative arc, specific emotional states, or music scenes; Jelinek, more than just about anyone going, is exploring sound as an end in itself, the way a painter might explore the line or a filmmaker, light. Farben, his house alias, is the German word for "colors," after all. That he chose this specific word strikes me as the truest use of language on any of his albums to date.
