Jan Jelinek
Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records

THE REVIEW

The glitch art and timbral archaeology.

“Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records”: the title already says it all, about that uniquely Jelinekian art of cutting acoustic diaphanities.

That of the German Jan Jelinek (who presented this first work at the dawn of 2000, signed with his first name) is above all a work of excavation; of excavation and sidereal transfiguration.

The mechanism is simple, and in the abundance of this simple yet demanding work lies the supreme gesture of electronics. The ars combinatoria that intertwines this work is based on an extremely simple logic: take something given—a certain number of samples, carefully chosen from avant-garde jazz tracks, rendered as sound particles—; build, starting from them, something completely different; exponentially multiply the sound possibilities through a very simple means: the loop; reconstitute, that is, starting from formless particles, a ganglionic ocean.

This electric alchemy, this renewed awareness of the unlimited possibilities of the synthetic medium, is not, however, an aseptic implementation of combinatorial artifice. Quite the opposite.

The search-for-loops-from-jazz-recordings is a contrapuntal construction, whose life lies precisely in the immobile movement that arises from the most ascetic attempts to set to music what is already musical, to give a new guise to fragments of what—before being shattered and recomposed—had recognizable forms; recognizable, strangely enough, even in the rarefied recycled product. Recognizable, albeit as irretrievably deformed, reformulated and transfigured.

From the chaos of fragmentation, from the spasmodic search for a completeness of samples, to the discovery of a reconstituted sound unity. This is the serene and rarefied work that the glitch craftsman Jan Jelinek completes. The result is something that, with every contrast smoothed and every roughness sublimated into an imperceptible movement, is placed in a suspended time. In that time when things refine but do not gray.

If the starting material has been deliberately decontextualized, sectioned, and reconstituted, its new life is, however, a life no longer tied to the original coordinates, nor to any other coordinates. It does not age therefore: because it simply has no time.