Jan Jelinek Avec The Exposures – La Nouvelle Pauvreté

“Every musician wants his own sound. I would imagine that in electronic music, the desire to carve a unique sonic identity into the endless wall of digital possibilities is even stronger. Simply put, with the amount of music being produced today, it’s difficult to stand out, and the number of people who have created a distinct musical fingerprint in the last few years is relatively small. You can always tell Pole when you hear him (although, judging by his new EP, that’s about to change). Same goes for Boards of Canada, Gas, Drexciya, and Aphex Twin. And way up on that list of laptoppers with an immediately identifiable sound is Jan Jelinek. Whether he’s recording as Farben, Gramm, or under his own name, Jelinek always jumps out of the speakers. I reckon the laptop set has roughly equal access to all the sound design and processing software out there, but Jelinek is doing things with his programs that other artists haven’t considered. He has an almost preternatural ability to burrow inside glitches and surface noise and emerge with the emotional heart of the sound. His fondness for jazz, which becomes more apparent with each record, is not a love of live improvisation, despite his recent Computer Soup collaboration’s indications to the contrary; it’s a love for the stacks of dusty, grimy, crackly vinyl artifacts of the post-bop era, a record collector’s view of jazz history. One imagines Jelinek getting chills from a chewed-up copy of some late 60s combo featuring electric piano, that something in the hisses, pops and wavering tone of an unsteady turntable must have touched his soul…..” – Pitchfork.com

Label: ~scape – sc16cd

Format: CD, Album

Country: Germany

Released: 2003

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