Jan Jelinek titled his 2001 full-length loop-finding-jazz-records in reference to his compositional technique: sampling and manipulating tiny fragments of jazz vinyl. Critics never failed to mention how it was put together, and a lot of them claimed to hear elements of the source material in Jelinek's grooves. As much as I loved loop-finding-jazz-records, I didn't really hear the jazz embryo it supposedly matured from. That might have been because I fell in love with Jelinek's sound via personal_rock, an album he recorded under the name Gramm in 2000. Personal_rock has a palette quite similar to loop-finding-jazz-records, but the sources for his warm, crackly sound remained a mystery at that time. I believed the hype regarding his inspiration for loop-finding-jazz-records, but the samples were transformed so radically that the sounds could rightfully be called Jelinek's own.
Jelinek's relationship with jazz was a little fuzzy through his first three full-lengths, but this excellent collaboration with Japanese electronic improv trio Computer Soup makes the connection plain. Jelinek's Rothko-esque technique-- all warm, blurred hues and unpredictable surges-- fits perfectly with Computer Soup's jazz aesthetic. At its best, Improvisations and Edits (recorded live in Tokyo last September, then tweaked in the studio) is a signpost pointing toward a new path for electronic, improvisational music. What makes the record remarkable is the way it refers back to the patterns and history of jazz, as well as our collective memories of the genre, while still managing to sound like another strand of music altogether.
The mind-blowing first track "Straight Life" is perhaps the best example of what the album has to offer. Jelinek's trademark smears and washes occupy the midrange, like ghosted images of Joe Zawinul's electric piano floating quietly in the wind. DSP jazz modes are set against a walking bassline (possibly computer generated) and a gently tooted trumpet complete with Harmon mute, a dead ringer for Miles Davis' Prestige-era ballads. The effect is something like a three-dimensional film, with different realities on each layer; images of what jazz was manage to interact with a real-time demonstration of all it could be.
Computer Soup lean heavily towards electronics themselves, so it's not always easy to know who does what. There's some plucked guitar, and that muted horn crops up repeatedly throughout the record, but the bulk of the sounds seem to bubble up from deep within circuitry. "Ballads" echoes the dreamy feel of the opening track with only slightly less success, but "The New Anthem" is a jaw-dropping return to form, as Jelinek's heavily modulated chords and glitches again duet with the serene trumpet wails, this time backed by some light cymbal brushing. "Hot Barbecue" shows the collaborators in a less controlled mode, with chaotic computer-game bleeps working to elbow the horn out of the way.
The noisy tracks are a bit less unique, as they discard the multi-layered, referential depth that makes the best aspects of this album so powerful. "Watch What Happens", while toned down a bit, meanders and comes up short. Such is the nature of improvisation: you often have to sit through moments of tedium to arrive at brilliance. Like any free-form collaboration worth its mettle, though, Improvisations and Edits summons a handful of those epiphanies.
