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FAITICHE 037LP
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Mark Templeton is a Canadian media artist and the founder of Graphical, an audiovisual label dedicated to publishing his own musical and image-based experiments. Mark's audio compositions are constructed from reel-to-reel tape loops and sampled cassettes that are contrasted with contemporary sound techniques. In his published photobooks, he incorporates his own 35mm pictures and found images, focusing on intangible fantasies and realities. During his audiovisual performances, he utilizes digital instruments while projecting his own photographs, VHS footage, Super 8 film, and other sampled video. Mark Templeton's reinterpretation of outdated media as musical instruments makes him a compelling artist for the Faitiche label roster. For his debut on Faitiche, he browsed his old hard drives and invited Andrew Pekler to listen through and co-produce a selection of Mark's unreleased works. The compositions act as a series of snapshots: a look back at a decade of archived sounds, re-envisioned and re-imaged for Faitiche. The album contains nine tracks that follow an AB song structure. Each piece begins with verse A, transitions into verse B, and then ends. This simple formula creates a dichotomy that is also present in Mark's diptych photographs, featured in the artwork. Throughout the album, both juxtaposition and inherent connections are simultaneously at play. One way or another, Two Verses provides a beginner's guide to Mark Templeton's highly idiosyncratic catalog.
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FAITICHE 036LP
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Jan Jelinek's Social Engineering brings together thirteen text fragments from so-called phishing emails. Using speech synthesis, they are spoken, sung, and/or transformed into abstract textures. The result is a 36-minute language and sound collage devoted to the dark forces of phishing.
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FAITICHE 035LP
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First vinyl edition of the album Rhetorical Islands, originally released by Giuseppe Ielasi in 2012 as a limited-edition CD on his Senufo Editions label, with recordings made in 2011 as a commission for l'Audible Festival, Paris. The album's ten tracks have neither titles nor accompanying text, standing for themselves as what Ielasi himself has called "isolated sound worlds." They are nonetheless unparalleled in their plasticity, acoustic events with a rare degree of tangibility. Ielasi evokes physical objects, some of which seem to have been constructed out of paper and cardboard, others based on a mechanics of elastic materials. Of course, these objects are hallucinations, and precisely because Ielasi constructs them so masterfully there's no need for any further information. Here's to everyone creating their very own sculptures while listening to Rhetorical Islands. The front and back cover features 0.058, a work on paper by the artists Thomas & Renée Rapedius. They make sculptures whose form and artistic inspiration are defined by their materials. Like Ielasi's acoustic islands, their impact derives from self-referentiality, resulting in paradoxical objects that embody both a detailed material study and a potential for free association.
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FAITICHE 034EP
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The vinyl single Love/Hate brings together two sample collages on the theme of good and evil. Often evoked and sung about, but rarely in such concentrated, systematic form, these collages present the words "love" and "hate" in a variegated catalogue of articulations. Poirier's miniature radio play is anything but misanthropic: never before has the message of hate been conveyed in such a wonderfully warm-hearted manner. The Love side features a track originally released by Jan Jelinek in 2005 on the Eastern Developments label under the long-forgotten pseudonym The Exposures.
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FAITICHE 033LP
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SG is none other than Andrew Pekler returning to Faitiche with an album of sentimental guitar escapism. For Lovers Only/Rain Suite features ten tracks made using only an electric guitar and a handful of effects pedals (plus some additional recordings of rain) and finds Pekler once again attempting to reconcile his tendencies towards kitsch, experimentation and minimalism. Faitiche asked notorious Chicago romantic Sam Prekop for his take on the album -- his reply: "It's a wonder where the rivers go and far, how fast or slow. Just seconds to remember, who can forget, when you are lost. I think to recount every step, in both hands, eyes open, the clouds unfold, one two three. Every other step, just as well. Where the moss is soft, you know strong. How many hours, days? I could have been careful, did I forget? Never mind. Waking up, in these arms, where the rivers go, slow. One two three, one two three."
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FAITICHE 032LP
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Faitiche welcomes Andrew Black aka blackbody_radiation. His debut album Ultra-Materials gathers six ghostly drones, created with the help of sound masking. Andrew Black, who hails from one of the UK's post-industrial North West Milltowns has a sensitive feeling for space and its acoustics. Having trained as a designer and operated within the realms of architecture and public space, it was only natural to extend his interest to manipulating field recordings. The six pieces collected on Ultra-Materials provide an insight into Black's highly sensitive minimalism: they stand for a subtly meandering mediation on room acoustics and place, which are manipulated with the help of sound masking, among other things -- that is, the addition and superimposition of artificially generated frequencies to mask unwanted sounds. Sometimes the pieces are reminiscent of warm engine noise, sometimes one thinks of carefully captured natural phenomena. Their strength lies in their elusiveness: free of concrete attributions or musical location, they can unfold their hypnotic pull without revealing anything about their origins. Harmonics at times shimmer, at times warble and at times coexist. It is an attempt to get in touch with our listening abilities.
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FAITICHE 031LP
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One of the most notorious hatemongers in movie history is Captain Ahab from John Huston's 1956 classic Moby Dick. His manic monologues cast a spell on generations of viewers. Berlin based musician and sound artist Jan Jelinek has now turned the voice of Ahab into a musical instrument. Faitiche presents Jan Jelinek's soundtrack for SEASCAPE - polyptych, an audio-visual software developed in collaboration with Canadian new media artist Clive Holden in 2022. SEASCAPE - polyptych is based on image and acoustic source material from Moby Dick. While Holden works on manipulating film sequences, the voice of Ahab plays a central role in Jan Jelinek's soundtrack. The dynamic volume and tone of the captain's speech control a synthesizer system that turns Ahab's voice into ten abstract soundscapes. In this production the voice gives the impulse and controls things but is not the sound of spoken word itself that you hear. Only occasionally can snippets of speech be heard so that syllables or sounds are recognizable. Instead, you hear compositions made of hissing, soundscapes, and eruptive sounds. The atmosphere is dark and sinister. Still every piece has a clear sonic structure and follows an understandable dramatic composition. This music is abstract but not overwhelming. Quite the opposite, SEASCAPE - polyptych is an invitation to listeners to let themselves be carried by the stream of sonic events. Although part of a media art work, the soundtrack can be enjoyed without any of this connecting superstructure. It works with no previous knowledge. But what happens when one does know that it's the sonic waves of a human voice that is controlling a network of synthesizers? If you want to hear Ahab, you will hear a choir of Ahabs in every piece of sound. The subliminal threatening as well as the conjuring Ahab. Finally, the Ahab who whips up his crew and tears them with him into their downfall. The majestic "on the quay now, waiting and watching", the oppressive "drawn towards the whirlpools center" -- they are all music as well as sonic discourse. Includes download code.
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FAITICHE 030LP
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Faitiche presents the album Exq I by Berlin underground techno legends Muellie Messiah & Punk not Punk, mainly known under their 100Records moniker. Weighing in at 36 minutes, the track was recorded in 2010, effortlessly intermingling dub, drone, and collage, a blend achieved thanks to the duo's jazz-inspired approach to improvisation. 100records is one of the last undiscovered treasures of the Berlin underground of the 1990s and 2000s. Like Elektro Music Department, 100records is unthinkable without techno and the club scene, but with a few exceptions the duo's tracks are not aimed at the dancefloor. With a claim to universality and a broader frame of reference, 100records developed a more extensive understanding of sound that rests on three pillars: the understated analogue drums of the Roland TR-808, a blurred, dubby sound, and improvisation. On first hearing, Exq I has little in common with the groovy, detailed, variation-rich sound usually associated with 100records. Recorded at the end of a highly productive decade, it is an echo speaking of exhaustion in which dub, drone and collage converge to form something whose jazz sensibility makes it readily identifiable as the work of 100records. 100records was founded in 1994 by Muellie Messiah (Dirk Budde) and Ekki 808 (Ekkehard Rau), who were joined in 1999 by Punk not Punk (Martin Osti). Around 2002, Ekki departed, leaving Budde and Osti to continue as a duo. Since then, their relationship has shaped 100records: Budde is the driven lone genius doggedly pursuing sounds, Osti the pragmatist who turns ideas into music. As well as making music, Budde is also a musicologist. In 1997 he published his PhD thesis entitled "Take Three Chords... Punk Rock and the Development to American Hardcore." As well as being his specialization, punk is also part of his identity: in the 1980s he sang and played keyboards in various punk bands in Kassel, the best-known being Haunted Henschel. After the fall of the Wall, attracted by the freedom of the newly reunited Berlin, Budde packed his bags and drove to the formerly divided city, having already become acquainted with techno at Kassel's influential Stammheim club. Includes download code.
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FAITICHE 029LP
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"Faitiche presents Groupshow's Greatest Hits: The ten tracks on this first vinyl album by Groupshow (Hanno Leichtmann, Andrew Pekler, Jan Jelinek), recorded between 2005 and 2018, document concert recordings and studio improvisations by the trio. In improvisation there are no mistakes, only missed opportunities. Groupshow found their first opportunity in the routines of live performance and they used this opportunity to break with these routines. The trio consisting of Jan Jelinek, Hanno Leichtmann and Andrew Pekler came together in the context of Kosmischer Pitch, playing live versions of the music from Jelinek's 2005 studio album of that name. During this project, the musical interaction between the three participants quickly emancipated itself from the original program, departing from fixed roles and finding a distinct form in constant change. Groupshow sessions -- rehearsal, concert or recording -- are always improvised. The interplay of the various sound sources, converging from the directions of 'electronics', 'percussion', and 'guitar', does not follow the krautrock wave logic of crescendo and morendo. Jelinek, Leichtmann, and Pekler have established a method of transparent density in which links and breaks are not concealed but remain audible. The music works through attraction and repulsion, with a loosely organized structure that always leaves enough room for the next intervention. The principle here, repeated even in the smallest units, is that of duration. Groupshow think of their music in terms of an installation: no starting point, no dramaturgy, and ideally no end. Concerts take place not raised up on a podium, but in the middle of the room on a level with the audience, who only enter the space with the musicians and instruments once their interaction is already underway. In 2008, Groupshow used this approach to create a live soundtrack for Andy Warhol's film Empire, over the full length of eight hours and five minutes. Recordings in general and the 'Greatest Hits' format in particular are another key aspect of this ongoing work on a collectively modulated continuum. The ten tracks on this first vinyl album by Groupshow, recorded between 2005 and 2018, document the ephemeral capturing of opportunities that were not missed. Extracts and essences of an endless movement of searching. The sprawling form of the whole, suspended in succinct, separate units. To paraphrase Lao Tzu and Roland Barthes, one might say: 'Once their work is done, they are no longer attached to it. And because they're not attached to it, it will remain.'" --Arno Raffeiner, 2022 Includes download code.
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FAITICHE 027LP
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As Jonathan Scherk's split album with Daniel Majer, It's Counterpart (FAITICHE 019LP, 2019), made abundantly clear, Jonathan Scherk is a master of his craft. Toon! immerses you in a highly distinctive world of plunderphonics-sampledelica-variations acousmatiques that's impossible to classify while feeling familiar nonetheless. Following a strict two-minute format, thirteen complex sound constructions offer a range of experiences -- as if the neurosciences had developed an acoustic formula capable of triggering illusions of memory. 13 tracks = 13 déjà-vus. When department stores dream ... epiphanies appear in elliptical rotations. Afterthoughts recalled on the beach as a child, soft-drawn and befuddling. Are they dreams? Are they metempsychotic leakage? With cup so full-brim, there's bound to be spillage. Toon! is sleeping on-your-feet, in the light. The pleasure must be more than belletristic, but what's left to say? Perhaps the sun is simply too bright. Includes download code.
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FAITICHE 028LP
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Living Room is the third solo album by Roméo Poirier and, following his much-praised Hotel Nota (2020), his debut for Faitiche. The French musician and producer transforms the layering of different times into a free-flowing pulse that sounds both nostalgic and mysteriously ahistorical. Poirier takes music seriously as a time-based art -- not just in the sense of duration, but also in the way time is refracted into autobiographical experience, historical dimensions, and stages of evolution. By immersing and reflecting himself in these different layers, he creates a succession of new balances between various tempos, iterations and developments. Poirier's music emerges from a continual questioning and reformulation of his own oeuvre and thus of his own past, drawing on an ever-expanding archive of self-recorded loops. "I always resample myself, using fragments of a track to make a new one, as an ongoing process," he explains: "The sound is evolving with me in parallel and the loops carry in their DNA all transformational stages, filled with previous tracks, sedimented." Originally a drummer, Poirier connects his various sources almost without a clearly identifiable beat. He prefers an organic pulse, mutable like the human sense of time and its fluidity. The aquatic feel of certain tracks on Living Room is no coincidence: among other devices, he uses a waterproof loudspeaker and a hydrophone to play back and rerecord tracks in the bathtub. Drawing on a sample collection assembled by his father, also a musician, the human voice enters Poirier's music for the first time. But it remains free of overly unambiguous signifiers. Besides its link to time, the fascinating thing about music is that it has meaning without needing to be decoded. Living Room goes back to the private but universal origin of human experience: "I liked the idea that a possible quest for a musician could be echoing the first encounter we had with language, in a prenatal state: its prosody, melody and tones, without being cluttered with meaning." Includes download code.
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2LP
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FAITBACK 012LP
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2024 restock. On textstar+ Jan Jelinek brings together the material from the CMYK series, four EPs he released between 1999 and 2002 under the pseudonym farben (the German word for both colors and paints). On double-LP vinyl for the first time. The selection of tracks has been remastered from the original tapes, joined by two additional pieces that appeared on compilations during the same period. Another new element is the Polaroid, showing the origins of a world: Jelinek's home studio in Berlin at the time. The farben project has its roots in Jelinek's love of house as a reductionist vision of soul. Of four to the floor as a proposition that can be accessed anywhere. Of electronic dance music as a realm of possibility that can be continually expanded. farben was written as contemporary house music. As a text about excitement and euphoria. The arrangements were made directly while recording to DAT, on a twelve-channel mixing desk. Several track titles suggest a link to live concerts, coupled with the context of machine music and bedroom recording. Others affirm pop music's most extravagant stock phrases about various states of love. farben is the opposite of genre: a music spawning new terms (clicks & cuts, micro-house) that never manage to fully capture it. The four CMYK EPs are designed as a network of references that cannot be missed but that can also never be precisely deciphered. The vectors of sound, word and image point to Isaac Hayes and Ornette Coleman, to Detroit and the first generation of the Red Army Faction, to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. So multifarious that they are distorted to the point of recognition. Overall, you hear sonic docufictions whose appealing vagueness derives precisely from this oscillation between clarity and ambiguity, which is also the source of their poetry: the lyricism of the pure circulation of signs. The sampler Jelinek used for these tracks had to be fed with floppy disks, imposing a memory limit of 1.44 megabytes per audio quotation from soul or jazz records. As a necessary consequence of this, the individual references, like the dots of color, are dissolved into details and abstractions. Even two decades after its original release, textstar+ does not come across as an epitaph to the modern era. Instead, it appears as a euphoric affirmation of the utopias of the twentieth century, translated into new sound texts via the aesthetic strategies of abstraction, collage, networking, and speculation. Gatefold sleeve; includes download code.
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FAITICHE 025LP
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Faitiche presents, for the first time on vinyl, a selection from the 84-track remix project originally released in 2013 as a three-tape set by Trip Shrubb, aka kptmichigan, aka Michael Beckett. Known to many from bands like Tuesday Weld or The Schneider TM Experience, Beckett remixed his way through Harry Smith's famous Anthology of American Folk Music -- a compilation of American folk, blues and country recordings released in 1952, soon to become key point of reference for the emerging folk revival movement. Having translated the title into the local dialect of the part of Germany where he lives, Beckett began reinterpreting all of its 84 tracks using sampler, effect pedals and loops -- sometimes making several tracks in a single day. A colossal undertaking whose results are beyond accomplished and that is summed up in the selection of thirteen tracks on Trewwer, Leud un Danz. Includes download code.
Murray Royston-Ward writes about Trewwer, Leud un Danz: "Total sacrilege ... A collection of remixes of tracks from Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music which was originally released in its entirety. The album is titled Trewwer, Leud un Danz (sorrow, song and dance) which is drawn from an endangered 'Low German' dialect (lippisch Platt) and is poetically approximating Smith's volumes 'Ballads, Social Music and Songs'. The hardware employed encompasses analogue, virtual analogue and digital. A primordial soup of electrical fields, striated granulation, micro-circuitry, molecular oscillations and mathematical manipulation; communicating directly with the guitars, zithers, mountain dulcimers, fiddles, jaw harps, banjos, harmonicas and human voices of 1930s America: itself a reterritorialization of African and European folk traditions that reach back farther and farther into our collective pasts. (...)"
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FAITICHE 005LP
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2022 repress. LP version. Includes download code. Subtitled: Voice And Tape Music. The world first learned of unknown housewife/mother/pharmacist/electronic experimentalist Ursula Bogner's work in 2008. Since then, her identity has been surrounded by rumors, her graphic work has been exhibited (CEACC, Strasbourg, France, 2011 and elsewhere) and her compositional instructions have been performed (by Mo Loschelder, Andrew Pekler, Kassian Troyer, Jan Jelinek, among others).
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FAITICHE 026LP
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"Faitiche presents Beispiel (German for 'example', also suggests playing together), a joint project by Frank Bretschneider and Jan Jelinek. Muster is their first album. Free electronic music, the result of spontaneous improvisations. 'Meaning' is a concept that is overused in connection with music. Muster does not call for the same kind of air quotes. With its title, German for patterns/exemplars, Beispiel's album frees itself from the ballast of teleological semantics. There is no overarching theme, no preparation, no reading list, no reason for this music. Just two facts: Frank Bretschneider and Jan Jelinek have known each other a long time and appreciate each other's work; and they share a love of modular synthesizers and of experimental set-ups designed to capture surprise. Bretschneider and Jelinek got together for their first joint session in 2016 and the years that followed brought more such meetings at Jelinek's studio for open-ended musical dialog -- at irregular intervals and with no clear objective. The improvisations were recorded in two stereo tracks: one track for Bretschneider's audio, one for Jelinek's. After each session, the recordings were processed separately, the options essentially limited to cutting and altering the frequency range. The nine pieces for Muster were selected from the resulting material. This approach reflects an ideal: music is when you play your first note without knowing what the third or fourth will sound like. When your 290th note still sees you leaving the beaten track, and when curiosity grows as the piece unfolds. Duping is part of Beispiel's practice. Improvisation is about disagreement. It's a matter of addressing the right issues. What's happening here? What's mine, what's yours? Are 'why' and 'where next' legitimate questions? Muster is an exemplary work. Nine suggestions for what can be. Nine ideas for possibilities of listening." --Arno Raffeiner Includes download code.
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FAITICHE 024LP
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Faitiche releases an album version of the radio piece Vom Rohen und Gekochten (The Raw and The Cooked) originally composed and produced by Jan Jelinek for the state broadcaster SWR2. The album The Raw and The Cooked brings together five sound collages that deal with the consistency of material and its mutability. Solid, raw, boiling, powdery, liquid, broken and folded -- categories which describe the nature of material. They can also be read in a chronological sequence: solid becomes broken becomes liquid becomes powdery... Material tells of its essence as it drifts through its states, always in correspondence with external energies. The Raw and The Cooked observes the artists Thomas & Renée Rapedius as they design their paper and metal objects and the artist Peter Granser as he ritually prepares Japanese tea, it shatters glass, bends metal and burns wood. The resulting audio documents capture processes of material transformation as sound. The Raw and The Cooked was created with the help of ITO Raum Stuttgart and Thomas & Renée Rapedius. Originally produced for radio broadcast on Südwestrundfunk in 2020 it contains a variation of the collage "Zwischen/Raum" that was made with funding from Musikfonds. Includes download code.
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FAITICHE 023LP
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Fortunately for Faitiche, Dmytro Nikolaienko agreed to open up the jewelry boxes of his tape-loop archive for his debut album on the label. What came to light was a collection of dreamy glittering gems, masterfully presented using the compositional possibilities of analog tape machines. Some may consider a tape machine to be limited as a musical instrument, but Rings makes a convincing case with its sure-handed use of the available parameters -- moving tape over the tape head mechanically and manually, cutting loops, manipulating timbre and creating noise by means of saturation. The results are eleven blurred, repetitive, rhythmic patterns that can be understood as an intervention against digital precision, as mechanical irregularities and background noise become musical events. For those familiar with Nikolaienko's work, his nostalgic approach here will come as no surprise: born in Ukraine and now based in Estonia, he has chosen a historical medium (that has been enjoying a renaissance for some years now) to record historical-sounding sequences. The way he manages his own back catalog is similarly archival, documenting the chronology of his tape loops in such a way as to leave no doubt as to their advanced age. And then there are his two wonderful labels Muscut and Shukai, the latter being an archival project releasing electroacoustic obscurities from the Soviet past. Which brings us back full circle... Includes download code.
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FAITBACK 005LP
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Reissue of Jan Jelinek's 2003 collaboration with Triosk, first vinyl issue of this album in 18 years. A long-lost vinyl album is back in stock: 1+3+1 by Triosk meets Jan Jelinek, originally released in 2003 on ~scape, existed only as a digital download. Now the remastered album is available again on vinyl. Includes download code.
What the press said about 1+3+1 back in 2003:
"Hence the album's titled 1+3+1 --it's a reference to how it was made. Jan Jelinek sent us stuff, then we did stuff, then he added the final touches. He did a little bit more editing and production and mixed and mastered it in Berlin." --Interview with Laurence Pike, Jazzgroove
"1+3+1 is not minimalist jazz; it is loop-based jazz, influenced and produced by a minimalist composer, and then given to a jazz trio with post-rock tendencies." --Pitchfork
"On 'Theme from Trioskinek', a jaunty, up-tempo tune not unlike the Charlie Brown theme is dragged down by Jelinek's compressed sound effects, giving the impression of a runner training underwater, straining for grace with every step. If electric jazz had its Bitches Brew, it's only fitting that someone, someday, would give us Glitches Brew." --SFWeekly
"This music is a fascinating exploration of the shadowground between acoustic jazz and studio processing. It picks up a particular dialogue about improvised performance and postproduction initiated in the 1970s by Teo Macero and Miles Davis." --Jazzwise Magazine
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FAITICHE 022LP
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Six great pop standards remembered: five pop songs are dissected by sampler, stretched, compressed, and re-collaged. In this way, their identity is lost. What remains is a vague concreteness: flashes of déjà vu and remote echoes that evoke the original. GES (Gesellschaft zur Emanzipation des Samples) active members: Helmut Schmidt, Jan Jelinek. Founded: 2009. Headquarters: Federal Court of Justice, Karlsruhe, Germany. Concepts and people of interest and influence: Bundesgerichtshof (German Federal Court of Justice), Karlsruhe, Circulations, emancipation of sampling, field recording, gambling, Kraftwerk, Marcel Duchamp, Orecchio di Dionisio, sampling, uguisubari, wind, Zwischen (Between). Includes download code.
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FAITICHE 021LP
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Faitiche presents a new album by Frank Bretschneider. abtasten_halten was made as part of the raster.labor installation first presented at CTM Festival in 2019. It is perhaps the most radical work in Bretschneider's distinctive oeuvre: abtasten_halten is a self-generating composition for synthesizer modules whose sole sound source is the movement of two VU meter needles. The resulting percussive sounds coalesce into rhythmic combinations -- all random, without repetition. The album resembles a meditation on infinite rhythmic variation. Includes download code.
Frank Bretschneider on abtasten_halten: "abtasten_halten (sample_hold) is a largely self-generating composition for a modular synthesizer system. Self-generating here means that as soon as a current flows, the various modules interact, but within limits set by the composer via the connections between the modules (patches): timing, tempo, timbres, dynamics. These conditions are kept variable to a certain extent or left to chance, so that the composition created is always similar but never the same. On the one hand, the use of random generators opens up possibilities that would not otherwise have been considered. On the other, it offers the fascination of the unfinished and the unique: totally unexpected musical events that you might hear only once. abtasten_halten combines my preferences for percussive music in general and electronic music in particular. Largely avoiding repetitive structures, the piece is more like a free improvisation, quiet and diffuse, but also extremely dense, in ever-changing contrasts and transformations. The tone generators are two modified VU meters whose needles, driven by trigger impulses, create a simple one-bar pattern by hitting against a metal spring that is connected to a piezo element. The tempo is continuously varied over a period of about ten minutes by several mutually modulating LFOs, ranging from about 0.06 Hz up to the lower audio range of about 18Hz. The percussive sounds thus obtained are then passed through low-pass filters with moderate resonance and random frequency modulation to additionally color the sound. Further processing is then executed by an echo module whose tempo and repetitions are again determined by random parameters. Finally, the audio signal is occasionally enriched with reverb to add more spaciousness to the sound."
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FAITBACK 007LP
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Repressed. Faitiche presents Jan Jelinek's album Tierbeoachtungen on vinyl for the first time, originally released on Scape in 2006. The album's six tracks took their cues from Jelinek's live concerts of that period: dense, slowly unfolding loop improvisations made with a laptop, various effect pedals, and miniature synthesizers. It is music that floats in a semi-conscious state between dream and awakening, always slightly mysterious, leaving traces that lead directly to the psychedelic-cosmic music of the kraut era. Includes download code.
In his release notes for Tierbeobachtungen at the time, the late lamented Martin Büsser wrote (2006): "The animal is experiencing a renaissance in music. It provides a reflective surface for our notion of the unbridled and irrational, of that Other the philosophers Deleuze/Guattari -- as part of their 'Animalisation' -- called the embodiment of artistic deliverance. And yet, how much of a liberation can art actually tolerate? To what extent can music truly throw off its fetters without descending into chaos? Jan Jelinek's album title provides a first hint of this development: Tierbeobachtungen (animal observations) is his fourth album for ~scape, and it addresses the issue of release and liberation. Recorded almost in transit, while preparing his move to a new studio, the tracks reveal and relish in their improvisational character, and drifting, lost sound -- yet they never lose sight of their underlying structure. Tierbeobachtungen might be Jelinek's freest and most personal work, with simply arranged tracks based on four to five layered and modulated loops, while his own studio equipment provides the main sampling sources, from synthesizer and guitaret to vibraphonette. Jelinek takes on the role of observer on this record, with a level of reflection remaining audible throughout. However, this is by no means intellectual, distanced music -- Jelinek leads us straight into a thicket, an acoustic jungle where sumptuous splendour meets the uncanny. A long tradition of psychedelic music pervades the recordings -- Amon Düül, Cluster, My Bloody Valentine -- yet whatever musical memories might vie for our attention, these are no clear-cut references, just loose associations. . . Similar to the pioneers of industrial music, like Cabaret Voltaire or Zoviet France, who experimented with field recordings to challenge Western listening habits, Tierbeobachtungen takes us to new, unknown territories and brims with sounds that defy geographic or stylistic classification, not unlike the semi-conscious state between dream and awakening. (...)"
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FAITICHE 020LP
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2021 repress. Faitiche presents a new album by Andrew Pekler: Sounds From Phantom Islands brings together ten tracks created over the last three years for the interactive website Phantom Islands - A Sonic Atlas. With his 2016 album Tristes Tropiques (FAITICHE 014LP, 2016), Pekler created a highly unique cosmos of ethnographic sound speculations. Sounds From Phantom Islands continues and simultaneously expands this concept: finely elaborated chordal motifs float like fog over fictional maritime landscapes. A masterpiece of contemporary exotica. Phantom islands are islands that appeared on historical maps but never actually existed. The status of these artifacts of European colonial expansion from the 15th to the 19th century oscillates between cartographic fact and maritime fiction. Sounds From Phantom Islands interprets and presents these imaginations as a quasi-ethnographic catalog of music and synthetic field recordings. The pieces on this album are based on recordings made for Phantom Islands - A Sonic Atlas, an online interactive map developed with cultural anthropologist Stefanie Kiwi Menrath. Includes download code.
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FAITICHE 019LP
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Faitiche welcomes two young artists from Canada; Jonathan Scherk and Daniel Majer hail from the post-rock and experimental scene in Vancouver, where they shared a studio for several years. In artistic terms, too, there is a surprising coherence: on It's Counterpart, their solo work naturally blends to create a joint album, making it hard to distinguish between their contributions. Majer describes his part as a shadow-like reflection to Scherk's brightly meandering collages. The album's title refers to this: It's Counterpart presents two solo artists who have met their match in one another. Scherk and Majer produce contemporary sound collages on samplers, laptops etc. using raw material drawn from YouTube videos, field recordings, cassettes, and LPs from the dollar bin -- the kind of rightly forgotten obscurities that have long since lost their audience, if they ever had one. In the hands of Scherk and Majer, they become abstract sound objects. The two artists don't concern themselves with the material's original context -- the sound's character is most important. This sets them apart from other collage artists. Their work might be called a contemporary upgrade of the classic tape collage: here, channeling a wealth of information is the main focus. Are these collages that trigger neither associations nor contexts? Au contraire! It's Counterpart is like an overheated centrifuge whose spinning extracts and joins together all of the harmonies ever pressed on vinyl. Melodies run amok. Includes download code.
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2LP
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FAITBACK 009LP
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Repressed. Twenty years ago, Jan Jelinek's debut album Personal Rock was released by Source Records (1999). Under the pseudonym Gramm, it brings together eight tracks that have not been available on vinyl since their original release. Faitiche presents the re-release of the album: Personal Rock will appear as a double-LP, featuring the original cover artwork. Includes download code.
What people wrote about Personal Rock two decades ago:
"Situated somewhere between Jelinek's much loved Loop-Finding Jazz Records, Farben, Move D's Conjoint project and Atom Heart's most immersive work for Rather Interesting, it's a late night album full of subtle production tricks and melodic house structures that belong to the pre-millennial IDM heyday, but which transcend its overly-masculine templates." --Boomkat
"A serene little masterpiece." --De:Bug
"Though many producers have pushed forward the clicks-and-cuts style of experimental ambience developed by German experimentalists Oval (among others), few have been able to match their knack for making abstract cuts into pieces of undeniable beauty. Jan Jelinek's first LP as Gramm is one of the precious few, and it's obvious from the opener." --AllMusic
"Organized in organic structures and minimal movements, the tracks get into utopian states and super-desirable moods, offering superior contentedness and dependable taste of the kind seldom sustained for a whole album. (...) Subway-Escalator-Soul." --Spex
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FAITICHE 018LP
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2021 restock. Faitiche releases a new collaboration between the Japanese sound artist Asuna and Jan Jelinek: the album Signals Bulletin brings together joint improvisations and compositions made over a period of three years in Berlin, Kyoto, and Kanazawa. Asuna's meandering organ drones merge with Jelinek's pulsating synthesizer and field recording loops to create dense superclusters that span broad harmonic arcs. Includes download code.
Jan Jelinek on the album (Berlin, 2018): "Watching the Japanese sound artist Asuna playing the organ, some people might be surprised. Asuna is no virtuoso flying over the keyboard in a rage. Instead, with the calm gestures of an office worker, he cuts strips of adhesive tape to the correct length before sticking them onto the keys of his instrument. In this way, large clusters of keys are held down, creating a dense and sustained range of frequencies, while the sound artist continually prepares further sets of keys or removes tape again. I have rarely seen a more convincing performance concept, with such a power to fascinate. I first met Asuna when we both gave a concert at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, his home city. He performed the organ drones as described above and I immediately knew I wanted to collaborate with him. Six years and five meetings later, we completed Signals Bulletin. The album includes both joint improvisations and compositions, recorded in Berlin, Kanazawa and Kyoto. Whether using prepared organ, Casio keyboards, or mechanical plastic toys, Asuna creates rich textures of sound that barely change over long stretches of time. It is a music without breaks. For a while, I was unsure how my loops made using modular synthesizers and live sampling fitted here -- until I realized the role I had to take in this duet: I would provide the rhythmically pulsating foundation over which his dense continuums could unfold. The result is harmonically drifting superclusters that put us into a meditation-like state. It can perhaps be compared to Automatic Writing -- a mode of creative expression floating somewhere between concentration and distraction . . . It is no coincidence that Asuna owns a collection of Doodle Art -- drawings jotted down during conversations or while talking on the phone . . . The artwork for Signals Bulletin features pictures from the collection, in this case sheets of paper from the pads provided in stationery shops to test out pens..."
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