Saturday 22 November 2014, 8pm
Electronic music pioneer Jan Jelinek performs a one-off UK live show with Japanese experimental vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita.
Jelinek has been at the forefront of German electronic music since his early forays into glitch and micro-house. Together they create expansive audio tapestries weaving together sounds of Jazz, Techno and Krautrock into an unmissable live experience.
Jan Jelinek’s approach is all about the transformation of sound, about translating parameters of popular music into abstract, textural electronics. Bypassing the rules of traditional musicianship, he prefers to construct collages from tiny sound fragments, from the lost-and-found products of samplers, tape recorders, media players and other recording implements. To this end, Jan Jelinek often works with loops and slight modulations to distil the gist of a piece of music and define it more clearly while masking its original source. Born and raised in Darmstadt, in 1995 Jelinek moved to Berlin to study sociology and philosophy – and embark on his experiments with a wide variety of sampling media.
2001 saw the release of “Loop Finding Jazz Records”, Jelinek’s first album under his own name, a selection of tracks based on old jazz recordings. Here, the original arrangements dissolved into mere acoustic situations, thus turning the medium of sound into an instrument in its own right.
During the following years, Jan Jelinek has collaborated with artists like Sarah Morris (ICE-Compositions) or German author Thomas Meinecke, played a range of laptop or gadget-based live sets, worked with improvisation ensembles from Japanese trio Computer Soup to the Australian jazz formation Triosk and created a number of audio-visual performances with programmer and video artist Karl Kliem for the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Kunsthalle Wien and Club Transmediale Berlin, among others. In 2007, Jan Jelinek, Hanno Leichtmann and Andrew Pekler founded Groupshow. A deliberate lack of predetermined repertoire or timescale underscores the trio's improvisational emphasis. The resulting performances possess no clear start or end and resemble freeform installations. Since 2008 Jelinek’s work has focussed on his own label, Faitiche, where he continues to release a range of ground-breaking and challenging works.
Masayoshi Fujita’s route to Berlin was a roundabout one. Introduced to music via Bon Jovi, his first stint abroad naturally took him to the motherland of rock, the United States. After a year in the USA, he returned to Japan to study film. His love for movie making, however, proved less pronounced than his admiration for Bon Jovi, a band he can still quote and sing from memory. He decided to learn how to play the drums, followed by extensive vibraphone training to craft and play his own, mostly jazz and electronic-influenced compositions. Determined not to stick to traditional vibraphone styles or techniques, Masayoshi started to prepare his instrument with pieces of metal, strips of foil and similar objects. The resulting new sounds, akin to distortions, help to expand the vibraphone spectrum without eroding the instrument’s intrinsic character or even abandoning it altogether. Jan says of Masayoshi - “Besides his extremely reduced and deliberate style of playing, it is this aural redefinition that makes Masayoshi Fujita’s craft so remarkable and noteworthy in my eyes. Literally caught in his spell, it was a delight and privilege to accompany his play.”
Standing awkwardly between neo-impressionism and electronica, Isnaj Dui (aka Katie English) conveys a minimal yet capturing sound using flutes, home-made dulcimers and electronics. As a classically trained flautist, English has also studied electroacoustic music, alternative tunings and Balinese gamelan and has collaborated with numerous artists from electronica acts to folk bands. Her material has appeared on a range of labels including Hibernate, Facture and Home Normal.
"...I vividly remember her looping flute melodies over the buzz of jack cable interference. Yet the mood of her performance is even more potent in my memory: the equivocal majesty of the flute, both blissful and rife with siren-like warning; the uneasy, lovingly handmade rhythmic structures..." - Jack Chuter, ATTN
Debut performance of the new music project by Stefan Panczak (Inch-time / Mystery Plays Records). Vintage electronics meets jazz meets laptop distortions.
