Jan Jelinek

German electronic artist Jan Jelinek crafts an array of pieces drawn from altered samples, spanning glitch-driven minimal techno, electro-acoustic drones, and radio dramas. Instead of conventional instruments, he assembles his material from audio taken out of field recordings and mainstream tracks, then reshapes it past any recognizable trace. His concerts, whether solo or alongside fellow players and groups, unfold without prior arrangement. Early notice arrived for the abstract techno cuts issued as Farben, later gathered on the 2002 release Textstar, and as Gramm on the 1999 album Personal Rock, together with material under his own name for Pole’s ~scape imprint, notably the 2001 Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records. Over time the music shed its rhythmic focus in favor of avant-garde leanings, reaching a point of near-total rhythm abandonment around the 2008 launch of the Faitiche label. Work in the 2010s encompassed multiple projects with vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita plus scores for dance and radio, among them the 2018 piece Zwischen.

After relocating to Berlin in 1995 to pursue studies in philosophy and sociology, Jelinek began testing sampling techniques on various media. Those experiments yielded finished tracks, leading in 1998 to minimal techno singles on Klang Elektronik under the Farben name. The first album, Personal Rock, followed in 1999 as Gramm. That alias, used for abstract dub and glitch-techno, allowed a balance between headphone listening and club functionality. Sampler-based cutting and reassembling took him next to ~scape for Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records, where sequences from 1960s and 1970s jazz were extracted and rebuilt into new forms. Both that album and Textstar, a 2002 CD gathering Farben material originally pressed in small vinyl runs, earned strong critical response; the original EPs later appeared together as the box set Starbox.

Beyond club dates, Jelinek contributed to festivals centered on electronic music and supplied extensive material for the Hanover Expo 2000, designing audiovisual environments for its youth media section. A laptop ensemble performance with Computer Soup was documented and issued as Improvisations and Edits: Tokyo, 09/26/2001. In 2003 he issued La Nouvelle Pauvreté under the credit Jan Jelinek Avec the Exposures, presenting a more abstract take on the Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records approach that sometimes included voices. The same year saw a further joint release with Triosk titled 1+3+1, in which Jelinek reworked the trio’s live playing. Lost Recordings 2000-2004, a set of muted glitch-hop credited simply to the Exposures, came out on Eastern Developments in 2005.

Kosmischer Pitch surfaced in 2005, moving away from techno toward Krautrock and ambient textures. Tierbeobachtungen followed the same direction in 2006 and marked Jelinek’s last solo album for ~scape. With the start of Faitiche in 2008 he presented Recordings 1969-1988, framed as a collection by the previously unknown electronic composer and sound researcher Ursula Bogner, said to have died in 1994. Although the label upheld Bogner’s existence, many viewed the project as Jelinek’s own creation, a suspicion reinforced when he staged concerts and exhibitions devoted to her catalog. Additional sound-collage output appeared under the name Gesellschaft Zur Emanzipation des Samples, and he joined the improvising trio Groupshow alongside Andrew Pekler and Hanno Leichtmann.

Bird, Lake, Objects, the first shared effort with Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita, arrived in 2010. Jelinek also revived the Farben techno project, releasing a self-titled EP and then Xango in 2011. Further limited LPs, some commissioned by museums or created for dance and radio, plus additional live documents with Fujita, were later compiled as Temple Vinylbox in 2013. A full-length pairing of Farben with James Din A4 (Dennis Busch) followed in 2014. Schaum, another duo album with Fujita, appeared in 2016. In 2018 Jelinek issued Zwischen, a condensed edition of a radio play originally produced for German broadcaster SWR2; the piece assembled interview fragments from Karlheinz Stockhausen to Lady Gaga, stripping away the spoken content to retain only pauses, breaths, and hesitations. Later that year Puls-Plus-Puls documented a live improvisation with Swedish drummer Sven-Åke Johansson. The rippling ambient collaboration Signals Bulletin with Japanese artist Asuna emerged in 2019, followed by The Raw and the Cooked in 2021.