~scape

scape32

		jan jelinek
kosmischer pitch Back in the heyday of Krautrock people often talked of ‘Cosmic Music’ – even then, the term ‘Rock’ was approached with plenty of caution. In the early 70s, Kosmische Kuriere spawned the Cosmic Jokers whose songs flaunted extravagant titles like “Galactic Supermarket”, a more than apt description of their sound. While bands like Popol Vuh began to experiment with early Moog synthesisers, Holger Czukay’s Can claimed to aspire to a ‘plasmatic sound’. This era was all about sound blurring, flow, a musical haziness of sorts, perceived as a transcendental moment, with the pioneers of electronic music on a quest for liberation. And the fact that these musicians, all born and bred in post-war Germany, decided to repair to imaginary outer space to pursue their aims, should most certainly be considered a political statement: everything they did was about escaping the confines of their own country. ‘We want to create beautiful music’, Tangerine Dream explained, ‘far removed from all those expressions of hate, aggression and despair’. And yet, this outlook had nothing to do with escapism, but rather with disconnecting themselves from formal constraints. Airy vibrations instead of earthy rock. Although the obvious parallels to Sun Ra’s space diaspora might seem uncanny, they hailed from an entirely different context and very different experiences. Jan Jelinek’s new album „Kosmischer Pitch“ (Cosmic Pitch) holds plenty of allusions to this era. While “Lemminge und Lurchen inc.” (Lemmings and Amphibians) might seem to refer back to Amon Düül’s 1971 double album “Tanz der Lemminge” (Dance of the Lemmings), “Planeten in Halbtrauer” (Planets in Semi-Mourning) is reminiscent of Arno Schmidt’s “Kühe in Halbtrauer” (Cows in Semi-Mourning) and thus cites yet another relentless chronicler of post-war Germany who refused to carve himself a cosy niche in his native country. Nevertheless, you will be hard-pressed to find any direct references or concrete quotes to, for example, Can or Cluster. Jan Jelinek merely extracts tiny fragments to serve as loose associations. Back in 2001, his “Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records” had staked out a similar reference framework without actually making it audible: although these recordings were sourced from old jazz records, the resulting music – to paraphrase a former INTRO author – consisted predominantly of “minutely atomised sounds, extremely freely woven crackle and snap noises exuding a shimmering sense of calm”. For “Kosmischer Pitch“ Jan Jelinek decided to work with loops and layers. In a way, the outcome really does sound ‘plasmatic’ and ties in with the drifting sounds of the early seventies – not by way of recycling, but at the most by reconstructing a certain mood. This album is all about tranquillity, submersion in sound, and tracks that might just as well extend to twenty, thirty minutes or even a whole two hours. In this, “Kosmischer Pitch” draws on the rationale of those variants of modern music deliberately unconstrained by the song format: whether La Monte Young’s minimalism, psychedelia or deep house – all these aural forms of expression were and remain about circumventing any conventional sense of time, thus creating, by means of carefully placed modulations, a sense of endless intensity. Naturally, even these tracks come to an end eventually, but only because great beauty can also trigger exhaustion. The “Pitch” referred to in the album title exploits this premise of rising above time and refers back to the arrangement idea of “wild pitch” deep house, thus pursuing a two-fold consolidation process: of tracks resp. layers and intensity. By transforming this basic principle of drifting into something audible - his music, albeit blurred, has always been transparent, hiding nothing – Jan Jelinek forges a new connection: from Conny Plank’s studio, the master console of early 70s Electronica, to Detroit and back. Moreover, “Kosmischer Pitch” is the exact opposite of retro, deliberately forgoing references to a specific time or place for vibrations that defy localisation. In 2006, Jan Jelinek will take this principle to the stage: not as a laptop solo artist, but together with guitarist Andrew Pekler (Scape) and Hanno Leichtmann (Static, White Hole, VSQ) on drums. (Martin Büsser)