You’d be forgiven for thinking that, after a playful and prolific run through most of the 2000s, the peculiar electronic music producer Jan Jelinek had taken an extended break. Since 2006’s Tierbeobachtungen, there hasn’t been a full-length released under his name. There have been collaborations (though it would appear that his work with Gesellschaft Zur Emanzipation Des Samples is, like his Ursula Bogner releases, simply another iteration of Jelinek working under another name) as well as a series of wonderfully weird vinyl-only 12”s that collected radio pieces and art commissions. One release—in an act of surreal prescience four years before the fact—even opened with a sample from eventual Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
Throughout this time, Jelinek’s one constant has been an ongoing collaboration with Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita. They released an album in 2010 and followed it up with a live EP in 2013. Now comes a second duo album, and the dialogue between the two is so sympathetic it's hard to tell just where Fujita’s prepared vibraphone ends and Jelinek’s whirring mechanisms and blipping loops begin. It’s a musical relationship that lends itself towards atmospheric explorations, the sounds taking on the hazy sheen of a particularly muggy afternoon. As Jelinek writes on the back cover of Schaum, he notes that the tendency of their work tends towards the tag of “tropical.” “I have long been obsessed with the tropics,” he writes. “This obsession involves a mental image of a specific quality of landscape: deliriously extravagant unstructuredness.”
So the grayscale palm frond on the cover is fitting, though “extravagant” would be a deceptive way to describe these eight woozy, mainly unhurried pieces, but there is something deliciously irrational about all of them. Small, fluttering drones mix with swamp gas and what sounds like a clock being wound up on “Urub,” and “Helio” sounds like R2-D2 getting burped. The bubbling glitches and cricket sounds that open up “What You Should Know About Me” soon turn queasy and comical, a bicycle bell and thrummed piece of metal providing a rhythm not unlike a submerged bumper car thumping against a sea sponge. Or is that a gamelan bobbing against the sides of a bath tub?
So gentle and breezy is Schaum that the density of sounds the two players actually stir up is easy to miss. “LesLang” and the aptly titled “Vague, Yet” could be a nature recording that’s gently processed into an ambient wash. But home in on the sounds that mimic chirping frogs and soon you’ll note that crickets and coos come into greater detail, as do all manner of squiggles, buzzes, plonks and squelches, to where your ears toggle between focus and fuzziness, just like listening in nature.
On the exquisite nine-minutes close “Parades,” Jelinek’s observations and obsessions come true and the album transforms into an uncanny landscape worthy of Henri Rousseau, weirdly flat and deeply detailed all at once. Each piece of Schaum is open enough so that they can be perceived as formless or self-contained microcosms. It’s an album immersive enough to suggest dense foliage or a wavering landscape completely submerged underwater, depending on your idea of paradise.
