Review Summary: Bitch I’m Jan Jelinek! (fumbles through rhyming dictionary) Uhhhhhhhh
Jan Jelinek’s 2001 LP LOOP-FINDING-JAZZ-RECORDS strikes one not through its showstopping innovation nor its seamless exploration of a particular sonic thread but through its perfection. Apparently built from granular samples of jazz records decelerated or accelerated into abstraction, the album’s formal means are hard to discern and it doesn’t sound much like jazz. LOOP-FINDING-JAZZ-RECORDS sounds, I suppose, like it follows the spirit of the subgenre of microhouse but not its letter: it certainly “clicks and cuts” along with early-decade classics by Sasu Ripatti and fellow German maven Hendrik Weber, but the sonic material is warmer, rendering tactility counterintuitively as a haze, somehow feeling dreamy and real at the same time. It is a remarkably controlled album, one that entangles webs of seemingly incidental sound generated by the physical imperfections of a vinyl sampler with aquatic button-thumps of percussion, organ, synth wash, and insistent bass ostinatos, all perfectly placed within an enveloping sonic weave. This mix of aleatoric principles and an inimitable rock-solid groove begs both the question of how this music could possibly have found its origins in jazz, as well as how it could have not.
The relationship of LOOP-FINDING to “jazz” per se, in fact, is both a music-nerd question about genre boundaries and a very real vantage point onto the record’s powers. The swing of “They, Them” has been so atomically reconstituted as to not at all feel anchored in the rhythms of big band, cool jazz, post-bop, any of that—and Lord knows which subgenre Jelinek pulled from to create its addicting backmasked triplet twinkle. But some mysteriously jazzy element sustains itself in the flux of popping and rattling micropercussion and psychedelic pads. The element being sustained is not the genre’s improvisatory mode nor its coolness per se nor the pull of any particular melodic scale so much as the aforementioned mission to capture perfection, a perfection available to be rendered only in the moment, grasped at through a cognition and then execution of music as a series of moving parts, a structural mesh of interdependence and independence, a metaphor for democracy.
LOOP-FINDING-JAZZ-RECORDS teems with life but finds for its bursts of creativity a perfect holding context, a workmanlike tan suitcase of an aesthetic in which to hold its many ideas. The aesthetic mostly depends upon a deep arrangement of bass tones under a suspended organ or synth chord, over which skittering, vivid, and highly treated house and techno rhythms unfold. Never at all boring, the album regardless plays exceedingly well as both background and foreground, dense with enough disruptive sonic ideas to garner interest when actively listened to but extremely practical in its repetition and sculptural subtlety for the purposes of writing, studying, and getting work done. With or without trumpets, Jan Jelinek here has accomplished a great musical task that transcends genre borders, manipulating sounds with delight until he is able to render a musical safe space, a vehicle that sets us somewhere else—a world with more order to its rollout of items of interest, more warmth, more euphoria—and right where we belong. This is one definition of great art: that enigmatic, lithe shape which Jelinek envisions under his marble block of minuscule jazz samples is that which authorizes our collective vista onto paradise. Praise nonetheless the generosity of the sculptor who can turn that vista into a mirror.
