Jan Jelinek at Soup Kitchen
Johnny James, Managing Editor
For the first time in his 20+ year career, Jan Jelinek is performing in Manchester. Here’s why you should be excited.
Jan Jelinek isn’t your average producer. His cerebral approach to music-making sees him not so much creating as deconstructing it. He takes organic sounds and through a process of reduction, morphs them into something unrecognisable from their genesis. The result is abstract and texture-based, often featuring ambient drones broken up by glitchy, flickering rhythms.
Jelinek atomises his source material into a million fragments, before stitching them into the shape of mellow bliss
Regarded as a pivotal and ground-breaking record by many in the electronic underground, his 2001 debut album Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records remains his most loved. Every sound on that album was sampled from – you guessed it – a jazz record, and yet without the giveaway title, you’d never know it. Part glitch, part minimal house, it’s an ever-warping odyssey in which Jelinek atomises his source material into a million fragments, before stitching them into the shape of mellow bliss.
Since that time Jelinek has operated under various aliases, including minimal techno master Farben and the ever-experimental Gramm. He has also released a number of further solo albums as well as collaborative records. Just last month, puls-plus-puls saw the German artist once again indulging a formative passion for jazz music, but this time with the help of one of free-jazz music’s most respected percussionists: Sven-Åke Johansson. Painstakingly precise and yet hypnotically intuitive, it’s a thing of rare beauty.
Speaking of rarities, Jelinek’s gig at Soup Kitchen is fast approaching. Known for their trance-inducing power, recent performances have seen the artist weaving diverse sound materials into hyper-intense drone collage and soundscapes, with each performance differing vastly from the last. With the added bonus of a support set from local audiovisual artist Joe Beedles, this gig is guaranteed to stun. Priced at a mere £10, there’s no excuse to skip it!
