With tiny details swirling like moths around the warm cone of light from a street lamp, Jan Jelinek leads us into a world of tiny sounds on his album »Kosmischer Pitch«. At first it may seem like a jumble of flying dots, but little by little these details come together to form a coherent whole. Since its release in 2005, this work has lost none of its fascinating complexity and significance – on the contrary, the microstructures and their profound effect are still a central component of Jelinek’s unique sound language.
Kosmischer Pitch
Jan Jelinek processes the fragments of the Krautrock genre in detail on the record »Kosmischer Pitch«. It can be assumed that he was inspired by the legacy of the Krautrock pioneers of the 1970s and mixed these influences with his own vision of a meditative and hypnotic sonic world. He manages to combine improvised organic sounds with those of electronic ambient in a highly concentrated manner. Ambient here does not mean continuously flowing synth melodies, but rather something lively and plucking that becomes a space in its entirety.
At the turn of the millennium, minimalist trends developed in the electronic music scene, while the mainstream genres of trance and techno became increasingly marginalised. Artists such as Aphex Twin, who had already been working with complex and experimental sounds in the late 1990s, now began to fully exploit the new possibilities of digital production and advanced sampling techniques. The producer Jelinek, born in Hesse in 1971, marks this decisive moment in the development of electronic music with his work »Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records« (2001) or its successor »La Nouvelle Pauvreté« (2003).
Microcosmic music
And so »Kosmischer Pitch« was born at a time when electronic music was increasingly turning to subtle detail work. It was about alienating the music, rethinking it and standing out from the mainstream dance floor music that dominated at the time. »Kosmischer Pitch« is representative of this sonic research. Jan Jelinek tinkers with the sound machines, letting each track build on the last, creating a microcosmic soundscape. They all work most powerfully in the overall context, and it would be fatal to consider a single title as an isolated work. Their most beautiful effect unfolds only in the common relativity they form with one another.
The distortion of conventional instruments and the minimalist structure of the pieces went far beyond what was usual at the time.
The track »Universal Band Silhouette« opens the album with delicate strings that are soon accompanied by filigree acoustic guitars. The sounds float gently through the room, gaining in density and volume. Galactic humming and overflowing vibraphone waves create a cosmic atmosphere that refers to the album’s title. With glockenspiel and piano melodies, Jelinek picks up speed on »Lemminge Und Lurchen Inc.« The metallic instruments make the title seem dark and cold on the one hand, while the warm, almost jazzy piano loops do not completely dominate this darkness, but repeatedly set small, light-flooded accents. What is special about all the tracks are the small sonic details that slowly unfold in the monotony of the loops. Wafting synthesisers, distorted field recordings and kick drums create an immense intensity of sound that is less about danceability and more about hypnotic density.
The album is considered to have pioneered the minimalist trend in electronic music. It helped broaden the view of the possibilities of electronic music as an art form and lifted a previously niche sonic aesthetic out of its cradle. In this way, Jelinek went beyond the boundaries of club music and established a new approach to electronic music. The distortion of conventional instruments and the minimalist structure of the pieces went far beyond what was usual at the time. Ambient albums are now piling up. What was once called a niche is now a trend. We should not forget who did the groundwork here – who refined and combined new genres time and again. Jelinek is one of those creators to whom we owe a wonderfully new sound aesthetic.
