Artist: Jan Jelinek
Album: ICE Compositions
Label#: faitback11
Format: DL
Release: April 9th 2021

On the occasion of the vinyl rerelease of 1+3+1 (Triosk meets Jan Jelinek, faitback05), Jan Jelinek's ICE Compositions are being made available digitally for the first time. ICE Compositions was released back in 2002 as a strictly limited vinyl EP on the En/Of label as part of a collaboration with the US artist Sarah Morris. The tracks are named after the different trains aboard which they were composed on a laptop while traveling.  

All of the tracks on the EP were interpreted by the Australian band Triosk and later re-edited/arranged by Jelinek. These versions/variations can be found on the album 1+3+1.

Written and produced by Jan Jelinek, 2002
Mastering by Guiseppe Ielasi, 2021

Jan Jelinek: A1. ICE 695

Artist: Jan Jelinek
Album: The Raw and  The Cooked
Label#: faitiche 24
Format: LP/DL
Release: Sept 17th 2021

Faitiche is delighted to release 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. Many thanks to Eckhart Holzboog and Beatrice Theil, as well as Frank Halbig/SWR.

Written and produced by Jan Jelinek
Mastering by Rashad Becker
Graphic design by Tim Tetzner
Copyright Control, faitiche 2021

Jan Jelinek: The Raw And The Cooked (Zwischen Raum)

Artist: Trip Shrubb
Album: Trewwer, Leud und Danz
Label#: faitiche 25
Format: LP/DL
Release: Oct 22nd 2021

Faitiche is excited to present, 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.
  

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 1930’s America: itself a reterritorialization of African and European folk traditions that reach back farther and farther into our collective pasts. (…)” 

faitiche 25, 2021
Music by Michael Beckett
Mastering by Rashad Becker
Design by Tim Tetzner
Published by La Chunga
Label image by Giant Fox

Trip Shrubb: Wach Up, Jakob

Artist: Beispiel
Album: Muster
Label#: faitiche 26
Format: LP/DL
Release: March 18th 2022

Faitiche proudly 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

written and produced by Frank Bretschneider & Jan Jelinek, G. Guillaume Studio 2016-2020 
Front image by Carlfriedrich Claus „Erwachen am Augenblick / Psych. Feld“, 1991 (© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022) 
18-6-28-FB&JJ-E includes a sample by Cristian Vogel's "Bug 3" 
Mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi 
Design & photo by Tim Tetzner 
Copyright control

Beispiel: FB&JJ2017-1

Artist: Roméo Poirier
Title: Living Room
Cat#: faitiche 28
Release: Oct 7th 2022
Format: LP/DL

Living Room (faitiche 28) is the third solo album by Roméo Poirier and, following his much praised Hotel Nota, 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.”


Written and produced by Roméo Poirier
Design by Tim Tetzner
Mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi
Text (back cover) by Lamiral Poirier
Thanks to Jan Jelinek, Tim Tetzner, Anna De Smet, Lamiral Poirier, Sylviane Poirier, Octave Moritz, Will Boyd, Guy Tournay, Antoine Pasqualini, Fabien Leclerc, Rutger De Brabander, Frans Robert, Anna Wery, Vittorie Degli Innocenti, Lucas Kraft, Léna Burger, Christophe Le Poëc, Augustin Gigleux, Daphné Vagegne, Jonathan Soskin

Roméo Poirier: Muscle de sable - Jan Jelinek Remix (remixed by Roméo Poirier)

Artist: Jonathan Scherk
Title: Toon!
Cat#: faitiche 27
Release: Nov 4th 2022
Format: LP/DL

As his split album It’s counterpart (faitiche19, 2019) made abundantly clear, Jonathan Scherk is a master of his craft. Toon! immerses us 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."  Dzierzawa/Jelinek, 2021

Written and produced by Jonathan Scherk
Liner notes by Samuel Dzierzawa & Jan Jelinek
Design by Tim Tetzner
Mastering by Kassian Troyer

Jonathan Scherk: B5

Artist: Groupshow
Title: Greatest Hits
Cat#: faitiche 29
Release: Jan 27th 2023 (digital single: Nov 25th 2022)
Format: LP/DL

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 programme, 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)

Groupshow: Music For A Plank Press

Artist: Eli Keszler, Roméo Poirier
Title: Remix + 1
Cat#: faitiche 28+
Release: Jan 13th 2023
Format: DL

Roméo Poirier adds another track to his last year's album Living Room: "Les encombres" is anything but what the title suggests. A compelling addition to Roméo's mysterious cabinet of curiosities. 
Eli Keszler remixes "Statuario" - the album's opening track - and transforms it into an atmospheric setting that seems to have sprung from a magical vaudeville act.
Written and produced by Roméo Poirier & "Statuario" remixed by Eli Keszler, artwork by Tim Tetzner, mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.

Roméo Poirier, Eli Keszler: Statuario (Eli Keszler Remix)

Artist: Muellie Messiah & Punk Not Punk
Title: Exq I
Cat#: faitiche 30
Release: March 3rd 2023
Format: LP/DL
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpbisn5TAC8

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 with100records. 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.

(...)

Atari Cubase sequencing became their speciality, with Budde and Osti sometimes working several days on a single sequence. The counterpart to these prepared sequences was live improvisation – on stage and in the studio. The recordings were edited by Budde, circulating as a weekly series of CD-Rs among friends and fellow musicians. In 2010 they stopped making music because, as Osti says, “we couldn’t do it any more”. From then on, the material was edited into final versions. In 2020, they completed their “legacy” in the form of 101 tracks. A number of these tracks have been released on SJ Tequilla’s Shot of T label, on Dynamo Dreesen’s Acido Records – and now on Jan Jelinek’s faitiche.

The faitiche release Exq I was made in the late period, in 2010, referred to by Osti as the New Music phase, when their productions became sparser and simpler. “This track is special for us. It made itself in the production process while we fought a weeks-long sound battle. The analogue equipment got warmed up over a few days, it wanted to keep going. We were like: Wow!”

In the decade-long process of editing the track, the focus was on reduction and deceleration: heavy dub. “Once we took some strong ecstasy. That heightened the effect, giving us a direct experience of the hallucinatory impact of the extended modulations.” Alexis Waltz, 2023

Muellie Messiah & Punk Not Punk: Exq I (excerpt)

Artist: Jan Jelinek
Title: SEASCAPE - polyptych (OST)
Cat#: faitiche 31
Release: April 28th 2023
Format: LP/DL

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 Ahabs 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 we hear. Only occasionally can snippets of speech be heard so that syllables or sounds are recognisable. Instead we 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.

Jan Jelinek: Drawn Toward The Whirlpool's Center

Artist: blackbody_radiation 
Title: Ultra-Materials
Cat#: faitiche 32
Release: September 8th 2023
Format: LP/DL

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.

blackbody_radiation: Rhyolite

Artist: SG (Andrew Pekler) 
Title: For Lovers Only / Rain Suite  
Cat#: faitiche 33
Release: Oct 6th 2023
Format: LP/DL

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 reconicile his tendencies towards kitsch, experimentation and minimalism.   What does Pekler's pseudonym SG stand for? Sentimental Guitar? Sound Gallery? Shy Guy? Sad Gnosis? Saudade Glamour? Soft Goth? We don't know, but we 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.

SG (Andrew Pekler): Sentimental Guitar Dream

Artist: Roméo Poirier & The Exposures aka Jan Jelinek
Title: LOVE/HATE
Cat#: faitiche 34
Release: Dec 1st 2023
Format: 7" vinyl only

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.

 From the original press release:

Originally intended as the intro to a special edition of the radio broadcast “Abenteuer Forschung” (Adventures in Research) on “sexuality and romance in digital postmodernism”, the composition collages countless “love” samples from the R&B genre. The “collage of digital passion” had a devastating effect, acting as an aphrodisiac that turned the recording session into an orgy. No further details were revealed by the broadcaster. Unfortunately, the programme wasn’t broadcast live so the secret is likely to remain locked away in the station’s archives forever. Nevertheless, Eastern Developments have managed to obtain authorisation for a “toned down” version of the original, providing the listener with a vague idea of the composition’s true impact.


A (HATE): Negative Feedback (Roméo Poirier), 3:37
B (LOVE): Collage Of Digital Passion (The Exposures aka Jan Jelinek), 3:02 

Negative Feeback (HATE), w & p by Roméo Poirier, 2023
Collage Of Digital Passion (LOVE), w & p by Jan Jelinek, 2002    
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi 
Design by Tim Tetzner

Roméo Poirier: Negative Feedback (HATE/A-side)

Artist: Giuseppe Ielasi
Title: Rhetorical Islands
Cat#: faitiche 35
Release: Mar 1st 2024
Format: LP/DL

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.

Giuseppe Ielasi: 06

Artist: Jan Jelinek
Title: Social Engineering
Cat#: faitiche 36
Release: May 3rd 2024
Format: LP/DL

In my mailbox: "Good day info, the conquer solidity static status gigolo. 2 caves dungeons song. pitch fungus vim, 14 triplets listlessness. celluloid advisor applying. season globe Italy, switch-off amphitheatre 42 updraught. The popularity buddha languish fifth mockery. holder condensate minima. the tutorial verifized (and rinse). 14 appetence concept’s. dullness captived cockerel. With good wishes, Dr. Fatimaiy Oakley"

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.

Jan Jelinek: Social Engineering 1 (The Narrative Of The Heritage)

Artist: Masayoshi Fujita & Jan Jelinek
Album Title: Schaum
Format: 12" LP/CD/DL
Label#: Faitiche13/Faitiche13cd 
Release Date: September 9th 2016

Masayoshi Fujita & Jan Jelinek: Schaum

Faitiche is very pleased to announce the release of a new album by Masayoshi Fujita & Jan Jelinek (faitiche13). Since their debut (Bird, Lake, Objects, faitiche03, 2010) they have played improvised concerts around the world. Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita prepares his instrument with various percussion elements as well as metal objects and toys, while Jan Jelinek layers loops made using small-scale electronic devices. Schaum (German for froth, foam) is the duo’s second album.
The river, forcing its way through veins between the outposts of the forest, was a great heart. Placidly as it flowed, gently as its descent beat against its vague banks, it brought and gathered sustenance for the busily mediating humus that swelled sunwards in the strangest cell configurations, trees, plants, animals. The silence all round was uncanny and stuck on the ear. Spasmodic squelches, a gurgling in the muddy hollows of the bank beneath overhanging shagginess, the slurping of ominous cavities, that shot out now and again between the long-spun threads of time, like something detonating, testified to the steady monotony of the process. From the forest itself came a crackling rhythm. There the mighty Pan could still be heard to rumble.
from the novel Tropics by Robert Müller (translated by N. Grindell)

Dear Masayoshi Fujita,
Many thanks for the audio files. Your additional vibraphone recordings go wonderfully with the material we have already. Preparing the vibraphone with more percussion instruments was the right decision. Combined with my tightly woven synthesizer and sample loops, the result is a fragmented sense of space. I have taken the liberty of manipulating certain recordings. One might now say that our joint recordings are both a basis for further processing and new pieces in their own right.
While listening through our improvisations, I noticed a tendency towards atmospheric sounds. I am almost tempted to call them tropical. This has strengthened my resolve to work with dense background textures – among others, I’m using material produced in connection with my radio pieces Kennen Sie Otahiti? (Do you know Otahiti? SWR2, 2012) and Dialoge zur Anthropologie (Dialogs on Anthropology, SWR2, 2013): artificial field recordings, jungle and rain forest settings that do not hide their staged, fictional character. They are synthetic and speculative. As you know, I have long been obsessed with the tropics. This obsession involves a mental image of a specific quality of landscape: deliriously extravagant unstructuredness, hostile to life but also excessively productive. I am fascinated by the idea of installing clear minimalist forms amid such luxuriant tropical growth. Perhaps my image of the city of Brasilia is a good example: the utopia of elegant and ascetic modernism, surrounded by rampant vegetation. Lianas and concrete: that’s exactly how our music should be!
Corresponding to this, I would like to expand our liner notes to include a quotation from Robert Müller’s novel Tropics – an expressionist travelogue published in Germany in 1915. It goes without saying that this work cannot be wholeheartedly embraced: its imperialistic fantasies of omnipotence and its “master race” posturing, characteristic of that time and place, are, of course, intolerable. Please excuse my casually dismissing this, but it is not what I am interested in here. Tropics is fascinating as a nervous jungle phantasm that openly indulges in exoticism at the same time as deconstructing it. In this way, the main character’s adventure becomes a journey into the subjective. It resembles a feverish inner delirium, exposing exoticism as a simulated, utopian perspective. What it boils down to is insubstantial, nothing but foam and froth.
With best regards, Jan Jelinek, Berlin 2016

Masayoshi Fujita & Jan Jelinek: Vague, yet

Artist: Andrew Pekler
Album: Tristes Tropiques
Format: LP/DL
Label#: Faitiche14
Release date: November 11th

Faitiche welcomes back an old friend: Andrew Pekler was the musical director of the 2011 album Ursula Bogner – Sonne=Blackbox (faitiche05 lp/cd/book). Known for his albums on Senufo Editions, Entr’acte, Dekorder, Kranky and other labels, Andrew Pekler’s new work Tristes Tropiques is now released by Faitiche. Tristes Tropiques is an album of synthetic exotica, pseudo-ethnographic music and unreal field recordings.  

Find out more about Andrew Pekler’s Tristes Tropiques in the following interview:

Jan Jelinek: You’ve titled your album Tristes Tropiques – a reference to Claude Lévi-Strauss’ famous account of his travels among native peoples in the Mato Grosso. If I remember correctly, the book can be read in two ways: as an ethnographic study of indigenous Brazilian tribes, and as a critique of anthropological methods. What exactly about Tristes Tropiques inspired you? The melancholy travelogue, or the formation of a new, critical school of thought?

Andrew Pekler: Both. Lévi-Strauss’ constant reflection on the purpose of his work and the often melancholy tone of his writing constitute an internal tension which runs throughout the whole book. Tristes Tropiques is many things; autobiography, traveler’s tale, ethnographic report, philosophical treatise, colonial history. But ultimately, it’s the author’s attempt to synthesize meaning from fragments of his own and other cultures that resonated most strongly with me – and led me to a new perspective on how I hear and make music. 

JJ: Listening to Tristes Tropiques I noticed a certain oscillation between references, which is what I really like about it. Obviously, your music alludes to the beloved fairytale kitsch of exotica, but it also repeatedly shifts to a mode of ethno-poetic meditation music that seems to have no beginning or end. Where do you yourself locate the tracks gathered here? 

AP: As a listener and as a musician, exotica music of the 1950s and 60s has always been a constant reference point and inspiration. And perhaps my listening has been ‘ruined’ by exotica, but as I have dug deeper into ethnographic archives of ‘traditional’ music, I’ve come to the realization that all recordings that evoke, allude to, or ostensibly document other musical forms have a similar effect on my imagination: I am most intrigued when I perceive some coincidentally familiar element within the foreign (a tuned percussion recital from Malawi that immediately brings to mind Steve Reichian minimalism, or the Burundian female vocal duet that sounds uncannily like a cut-up tape experiment, etc.). I suppose this album is an attempt to recreate the same kind of listening experience as what I’ve described, just with the electronic means that I have at hand. 

JJ: I know that you perform Tristes Tropiques not only as music, and that there is visual and spatial aspect to the presentation. Can you reveal more about this?

AP: I made an accompanying video – mainly close-up footage, shot in Thailand, of various tropical flora. The video was recorded at very slow speed and this gives the plants, flowers, trees, bamboo, etc. the appearance of rather abstract objects. In live performance, this abstracting effect is further emphasized through real-time modulation of the colors, brightness and other parameters of the video image. There is also an installation version of the video that is meant to be projected on multiple screens / walls and with its own soundtrack of heavily manipulated field recordings captured in the same locations in the jungle.  

JJ: We can get an idea of what this looks like from the beautiful video stills on the back cover of the album.

Andrew Pekler: Theme From Tristes Tropiques / Avian Modulations / Life In The Canopy

Ursula Bogner: Winkel Pong
Format: 7” Vinyl/DL
Label#: faitiche15
Release date: Sept 8th 2017
 
Faitiche is delighted to announce the release of a new Ursula Bogner record (faitiche15). Winkel Pong contains three previously unreleased pieces from the archive of the sound researcher who died in 1994. In 2008, Jan Jelinek put together a first album from Bogner’s tape archive (CD/LP Recordings 1969-1988, faitiche01). A second followed in 2011, compiled this time by Andrew Pekler (CD/LP Sonne = Blackbox, accompanying the book of the same name with texts, photographs and Bogner’s graphic oeuvre). For Winkel Pong the tape archive was passed on to Lucrecia Dalt. The Berlin-based Colombian sound artist and musician chose three tracks from the 1980s (exact dates unknown), editing the tape recordings for their release on Winkel Pong.
 
Gundrun Gut (Malaria!, Einstürzende Neubauten), an activist and reluctant chronicler of Berlin’s underground scene since the 1980s, has worked with Lucrecia Dalt. She is also familiar with Ursula Bogner’s work. Reason enough to ask her for an interview:
 
Jan Jelinek: Gudrun, how does it feel to be constantly obliged to talk about the 1980s Berlin underground as someone who was there at the time?
 
Gudrun Gut: I’ve learned to live with it as there are clearly too few people who witnessed it first-hand. Maybe it’s even important to do these interviews as a woman – so that someone actually says that women, too, have written music history. Men tend not to mention this. But it’s true, people do always ask the same questions.
 
JJ: Did you know about Ursula Bogner in the 1980s? Did you ever meet her?
 
GG: No, I never met Ursula Bogner in person and I only discovered her in 2008 thanks to Faitiche. But that’s no surprise: firstly, I don’t know every single woman artist, and secondly, far too many women artists never see the light of day. In the male-dominated art and music market, women are not considered important – or worse still, they are not understood. Look at artists like Sonia Delaunay, Eva Hesse, Bebe Baron, Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram. Some of them have now been discovered – but only recently. A lot has changed in the last few years: there is a growing awareness of art and music made by women.
 
JJ: But isn’t it annoying that the conventional distribution of roles still applies? One example: in many articles, Ursula Bogner has been presented as an “electronic housewife”.
 
GG: When Ursula Bogner is referred to as an electronic housewife, then sadly that reflects the situation of many women artists at the time. Women could only pursue artistic activities in private – transcendence was reserved for men. This has still not been overcome. But today, the home has become a site of professional production for all. I’m talking about bedroom producers: it is totally normal to make art and music at home. And that makes things interesting, because “working at home” is no longer associated solely with women.
 
JJ: For Winkel Pong, Lucrecia Dalt compiled and remixed three pieces from the Bogner archive. You know Lucrecia and you’ve already worked with her. How did you meet?
 
GG: I met Lucrecia through MySpace – I think it was 2007. Back then she was still living in Medellin, Colombia. Lucrecia’s father made loop machines for her that she still uses. The Sound of Lucrecia was part of my 4 Women no Cry compilation series on Monika Enterprise, each with four producers from different countries. She’s great fun to watch as a performer because she has a unique sense of rhythm and feel for music. Above all I’m impressed by her sustained approach as an artist, someone who can and does think around corners. I’m thinking specifically of her album Ou, for which she ploughed her way through post-war German cinema, using it as a source of inspiration for a soundtrack. This is proof that she thinks like an engineer – so it makes perfect sense that she would want to explore the work of Ursula Bogner.
 
Berlin, 2017

Ursula Bogner: Atmosphärische Energie (edited by Lucrecia Dalt)

Acoustic Surveillance Series - No.1
G.E.S.: uguisubari (Nightingale Floor)

Format: 7” Vinyl/DL
Label#: faitiche16
Release date: Sept 8th 2017
 
Faitiche is delighted to announce the launch of its new Acoustic Surveillance Series. Each 7” vinyl single in the series presents a historical system for acoustic surveillance, beginning with uguisubari by G.E.S.. The pieces on the record feature recordings of uguisubari – special floors in Japanese temples and castles. For this series, Jan Jelinek is reactivating his field recordist pseudonym G.E.S.
 


“And this” – he pointed to the stretch of bare floor ahead – “is what the Japanese call a ‘nightingale floor’. Relic of the old days when people wanted to be warned of intruders. Serves the same purpose here. Imagine trying to get across here without being heard.” They set off, and immediately the cunningly sprung boards gave out penetrating squeaks and groans. Ian Fleming,1964
 
This is how Australian agent Dikko Henderson explains the principle of the nightingale floor to his British colleague James Bond. They are on their way to the headquarters of the Japanese secret service. The notion that it might still have been using this traditional warning system in the 1960s belongs to the realm of fiction – but the actual existence of such floors is undisputed. In fact, it is surprising how seldom this early form of intruder alarm has been used in literature. Even in Japanese literature, or so I have been told, uguisubari has gone largely unmentioned. In a poem by Takehisa Yumeji, walking over a nightingale floor becomes a measure of gracefulness:
 
“Like a Grace whose shining heels make no sound while walking on the veranda with its nightingale floor (...)” Takehisa Yumeji, 1976.
 
In the Edo period, the nightingale floor was a popular acoustic warning system. The principle was very simple: when someone stepped on the floorboards, the nails holding them in place rubbed against metal clamps mounted on the underside of the boards, raising the alarm by creating a squeaking noise that resembled the chirping of the Japanese nightingale.
 
Thanks to the country’s painstaking reconstruction of temples and castles, these floors can still be walked on and heard today. During a residence of several months in Japan in 2014, I had the opportunity to mic and record nightingale floors at Nijo Castle and at the temple of Nanzen-ji. In my makeshift studio in the basement of the Kyoto Goethe Institute, I then made numerous pieces – all using the same sound sources: an oscillator and an audio sampler with recordings of the chirping floorboards. Two of these pieces are included here – they are both journal entries and tributes to the uguisubari.
 
Jan Jelinek (G.E.S.), Berlin 2017

GES: Nijo-jo

Lady Gaga, you once said in an interview that you write music for the fashion industry. Is fashion as important to you as music? 
-
Artist/Album: Jan Jelinek presents Zwischen
Format: LP Vinyl/DL
Label#: faitiche17
Release date: May 4th 2018

Faitiche is delighted to release a short version of the radio play Zwischen (German for ‘between’). Devised and produced by Jan Jelinek for German public broadcaster SWR2, Zwischen brings together twelve sound poetry collages using interview answers by public figures. Each collage consists of the brief moments between the spoken words: silences, pauses for breath and hesitations in which the interviewees utter non-semantic sound particles. These voice collages also control a synthesizer, creating electronic sounds that overlay and merge with the voices to make twelve acoustic structures.

We all know the speaker’s fate: you falter, you mispronounce, there are breaks, silences and false starts. This results in delays, a language noise compared by Roland Barthes to the knocks made by a malfunctioning motor. Such gaps can be disconcerting, standing as they do for a failure of the speaker’s rhetorical skills. But what happens when they become a constitutive, poetic factor?

Zwischen consists of twelve answers to twelve questions. The answers were all recorded in interview situations. From the speech of the interviewees – all eloquent public figures – the pauses are extracted and edited together. The result is a series of sound collages of silence. But this silence is deceptive, as it is only meaning that falls silent. What remains audible is an archaic body language: modes of breathing, planning phases, seething word particles in search of sense that can break out into onomatopoeic tumult or drift off into sonorous noise.

In a further step, each of the twelve collages controls a modular synthesizer via its amplitude and frequency. Supposedly defective speech acts conduct synthetic sounds and the speakers regain their composure – not via the spoken word, but through sound.

The opening questions in the various interviews are answered by: Alice Schwarzer, John Cage, Hubert Fichte, Slavoj Žižek, Joseph Beuys, Lady Gaga, Ernst Jandl, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Marcel Duchamp, Friederike Mayröcker, Yoko Ono and Max Ernst.

Jan Jelinek: Lady Gaga, (...) Is Fashion As Important To You As Music?

Artist: Jan Jelinek & Computer Soup
Album: Improvisations And Edits, Tokyo 26.09.2001
Label#: Faitback10
Release date: May 4th 2018

Faitiche is happy to be releasing the album Improvisations And Edits, Tokyo 26.09.2001 on vinyl for the first time. For the original 2002 CD on Soup-Disk and Sub Rosa (Audiosphere), Jan Jelinek and the Japanese trio Computer Soup (Satoru Hori – trumpet, Osamu Okubo - toys & electronics, Kei Ikeda - toys & electronics) presented eight tracks all recorded one afternoon in the trio’s living room in Tokyo. They are excerpts from a joint group improvisation that subsequently underwent rudimentary editing, on which Jelinek and Computer Soup worked separately.

Jelinek met the three musicians at his first concert in Japan in 2001, at Tokyo’s Yellow club, where Computer Soup performed as the support act. Delighted by their free improvisation on pocket-sized electronic toys, trumpet and oscillators, he arranged to meet Hori, Okubo and Ikeda a few days later for a session at their apartment. The resulting three-hour recording, made on their living room floor, formed the basis for Improvisations and Edits. A few days later, Jelinek returned to Berlin. Over the following months, they separately chose passages from the recording that were then edited and assembled into an album.

Formed in Tokyo in 1996 as a quintet (including Shusaku Hariya and Daisuke Oishi), Computer Soup began by performing with acoustic instruments on the streets of Shibuya. Ikeda und Okubo soon switched instruments, and from then on the group’s minimalistic but densely woven sound was defined by electronic toys, oscillators and Satoru Hori’s trumpet. Their first album was released in 1997 on the Japanese label Soup Disk. Eight further releases followed.
 

From the reviews of Improvisations and Edits, Tokyo 26.09.2001 in 2003:

The mind-blowing first track "Straight Life" is perhaps the best example of what the album has to offer. Jelinek's trademark smears and washes occupy the midrange, like ghosted images of Joe Zawinul's electric piano floating quietly in the wind. DSP jazz modes are set against a walking bassline (possibly computer generated) and a gently tooted trumpet complete with Harmon mute, a dead ringer for Miles Davis' Prestige-era ballads. The effect is something like a three-dimensional film, with different realities on each layer; images of what jazz was manage to interact with a real-time demonstration of all it could be.
pitchfork.com
“Improvisations and Edits” is a warm and mellow Ambient release with beautiful glitch fragments, static noise bursts and real trumpet intersections. However, there are times where it is the exact opposite, mainly effect-laden, overdriven and bouncy with a lack of melodies and focus, so be aware of these specific tracks.
ambientexotica.com
Often deliciously dreamy and hazy, “Improvisations and Edits” is like listening to an exceptional instrumental jazz performance while half-conscious or under some sort of chemical influence. Computerised blips and bleeps, loops and treatments and murky sonic skips curl up around desolate horn notes and scattered instrumental noises that culminate in elegant music.
exclaim.ca

Jan Jelinek & Computer Soup: Straight Life

Artist: Ursula Bonger
Title: Rhythmus 80 (bonus track, originally released on 7" vinyl 'Pluto hat einen Mond', Maas Media 2010)
Album: Recordings 1969-1988
Format: LP/DL
Label#: faitiche01 (2018 remastered version)
Release date: Oct 26th 2018

Ursula Bogner: Recordings 1969-1988 

Faitiche is ten years old. October 2008 saw the release of Ursula Bogner - Recordings 1969-1988, for which the label was created. While working as a scientist in the pharmaceuticals sector, Ursula Bogner experimented with electronic music, undiscovered, for over three decades. When Jan Jelinek first heard Bogner’s work in 2008, he was enthusiastic. The resulting album, compiled by Jelinek from Bogner’s extensive oeuvre, is being reissued in a remastered version (LP/digital) to mark the label’s tenth anniversary. The new version also includes four bonus tracks that were previously only available on a vinyl 7" single (Ursula Bogner: Pluto hat einen Mond, Maas Media Verlag 2010).

From the reviews of Recordings 1969-1988 in 2008:

pitchfork.com
Most of Recordings 1969-1988 sounds simultaneously like pop and art. Bogner's M.O. is to take a few simple loops - rumbling bass, watery plops, chirping squalls, laserlike blasts - and overlap them, producing songs so sweet they'll make you laugh (the elephant-march opener "Begleitung für Tuba"), so repetitive they'll hypnotize you (the swinging "Inversion"), and so inventive they sound alien (the robotic "2 Ton").

The Wire Magazine
Despite Bogner's status as a bona fide outsider artist, her music opens up a surprising number of connections. It's terse, yet playful; cosmic in reach, yet human in scale. Much of the strange, laconic material collected here would fit seamlessly alonside the recent anthology of work by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's John Baker - and there are occasional, skewed parallels with the gentle pulsations of Cluster and Harmonia.  

residentadvisor.net
Recordings 1969-1988 collects 16 of these early electronic collages, many of which clock under two minutes, and presents them as a crate-digging, proto-techno discovery along the lines of BBC Radiophonic Workshop alumni such as Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire. Raymond Scott comes to mind as well. Bogner's work exhibits that same kind of curiosity with what those machines could do: it's simple and short and imperfect.

Ursula Bogner: Rhythmus 80 (2018 remaster, bonus track)

Artist: ASUNA & Jan Jelinek
Album: Signals Bulletin
Label#: Faitiche18
 
Faitiche is delighted to announce the release of 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.

-

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. Both the structure of our pieces and our approach to our instruments allow a similar “absence”: we let the machines play and repeat themselves – while we, in a mild form of trance, adopt the role of observers, intervening only occasionally.

It is no coincidence that ASUNA owns a collection of Doodle Art – drawings jotted down during conversations or while talking on the phone. It is said that works made like this point to the unconscious and reveal pet motifs – because a doodler always inadvertently returns to his or her favourite themes. 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. The special quality of such doodles is that the jumble of drawings is the work of a collective whose individual members do not know each other. Layer by layer is added, by someone different each time – until it becomes a dense cluster of lines and symbols ...
Jan Jelinek, Berlin 2018

ASUNA & Jan Jelinek: Relief, Pt.1

Artist: Jonathan Scherk & Daniel Majer
Album: It's Counterpart
Label#: Faitiche19
Format: LP/DL

Faitiche is delighted to welcome 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, channelling a wealth of information is the main focus. So 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.

Jonathan Scherk: Get a Little s / Daniel Majer:  She Barely Spoke (excerpt)

Artist: Andrew Pekler
Album: Sound From Phantom Islands
Label#: Faitiche20
Format: LP/DL

Faitiche is delighted to present 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, 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 artefacts 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.

Andrew Pekler: Description Of Rain (Over Frisland)

Artist: Masayoshi Fujita & Jan Jelinek
Album: Bird, Lake, Objects
Label#: faitiche03
Format: LP/DL

Vinyl repress of faitiche03 & 13 available on July 17th 2020!

Queried on his favourite word in the German language, Masayoshi Fujita will pick ‘getragen’ – without a sliver of hesitation. Further questioning will reveal that he loves the term’s semantic signifiers, its inherent sense of “expansive, deep, quiet and sombre.” And yet, ‘getragen’ leaves plenty of room for interpretation: depending on context, it might also indicate wearing apparel or the state of being carried – two more mundane interpretations that I would rather keep from him.
Does Masayoshi’s own definition, however, apply to Bird, Lake, Objects? Only to a limited extent. Compared to previous Faitiche releases, Bird, Lake, Objects is certainly the most ‘getragen’ of them all. Nevertheless, this is by far not the first association that comes to mind. From a distance, these tracks seem rather introspective, cautious even – and reflect the recording situation: deliberately pared down, reduced to a single microphone in space and a separate track for all other instruments, each movement and action is chronicled by the treacherous mike. This confronted me with some unexpected and unfamiliar problems. For example, we had to swap out the seating in the studio as my favoured chair had a characteristic creak. Other, external influences proved to be beyond our control: fire engine klaxons, street noise and footfall became part of the recordings and their improvisatory nature. Each movement required careful orchestration, fully aware of its irrevocable nature. Space itself was always present and an audible entity, except on "Stripped to RM" (recorded without a microphone or vibraphone track). After extensive deliberations, we decided to forgo the vibes on this piece – a very similar version had already been released in 2008 (on the compilation Enjoy The Silence, Mule Electronic, 2008).

Masayoshi Fujita & Jan Jelinek:  I'll Change Your Life

Artist: Frank Bretschneider
Album: abtasten_halten
Label#: faitiche21
Format: LP/DL
Release: Sept 18th 2020

Faitiche is delighted to present 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. abtasten_halten is Frank Bretschneider’s first release on Faitiche.

"One sound can give birth to thousands of tones through self-fertilization." Pierre Henry, 1982

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 (thanks to Gijs Gieskes / Gieskes.NL). 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 colour 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.
The concept for the installation raster.labor was developed by Olaf Bender, Frank Bretschneider and David Letellier. Many thanks to raster - artistic platform.

On Frank Bretschneider:

Frank Bretschneider works as a musician, composer and video artist in Berlin, making mainly electronic work based on complex rhythmic structures and interlocking textures, whose many-layered sound is inspired by the experimental set-ups of modern physics, often supplemented by perfectly synchronized computer-generated visualizations. In 1986, he founded AG Geige, one of the most influential underground bands in East Germany. In 1996, he co-founded the label raster-noton and has since released many solo albums.

Frank Bretschneider: abtasten_halten C

Artist: GES
Album: Anthology of American Pop Music
Label#: faitiche22
Format: LP/DL
Release: Oct 23rd 2020

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

GES Glossary (excerpts):

- Acoustic Surveillance Series
A 7-inch vinyl record series curated by GES focussing on historical methods of acoustic surveillance. Each record introduces a surveillance system from the past. Starting with Uguisubari in 2017, the series will continue with the release of Oreccio di Dionysio in 2021. GES is open to further suggestions on this subject.

- Circulations
What happens to copyright claims when music from a passing car is captured in a street recording? Is it legal to use this recording freely or is it necessary to obtain licensing rights? Circulations re-enacts this recording situation: audio players are placed in public spaces, where they reproduce the desired sample material. The acoustically choreographed space is then recorded, creating a field recording in which everyday noises circulate together with seemingly incidental music.

- Emancipation of Sampling
Fuelled by its criminalization, the act of sampling existing recordings forfeited some of its artistic prestige (see Sampling). GES wishes to rehabilitate and re-emancipate the practice of sampling as a form of art in its own right. Strategy: 1. Name samples and sources explicitly. 2. Choose samples that are as popular and as recognizable as possible (Beatles, Carpenters, etc.). 3. The editing and manipulation of the sample must not compromise its recognizability (negotiable). 4. Use as many samples as possible. 5. Always name more sample sources than were actually used in the composition. 

- Field Recording
A compositional practice widely used in sound art and ethnomusicology that involves the recording of natural acoustical phenomena. Two additional requirements are usually imposed: The recording process should take place outside a studio environment, i.e. outdoors. And the person recording does not generate any of the acoustic material him/herself. GES expands this definition by introducing the concept of choreographed public space (see Circulations).

- Gambling
An acoustic event favoured by GES, already used in numerous sound collages (must take place in public). The most popular option is thimblerig, a cup and ball gambling game commonly played in the street. Compositional instruction by GES: Place an audio playback device in the proximity of a thimblerigger. Play works for orchestra (by Debussy or Mahler). Move slowly towards the gamblers with a microphone.

- Kraftwerk
The German band founded by electropop musicians Florian Schneider-Esleben and Ralf Hütter (a.k.a. Die Prozessoren) is the natural enemy of GES. Protected by computer-generated avatars, Kraftwerk operates a quote-hostile cultural hegemony. Their strategy: Install a special brand in the collective consciousness by means of a sophisticated system of quotations and references that may in turn not be quoted by anyone else. Other bands with such delusions of omnipotence: U2, Metallica.

- Sampling
Compositional practice whereby recorded music is fragmented, turned into sound collages and transferred into different contexts of meaning. Since the advent of affordable sampling technology in the 1990s, the music industry has been trying to criminalize and/or promote the practice. Both strategies are driven by the same principle: Profit.

GES: IOnlyCloseEyesToYou

Artist: Nikolaienko
Album: Rings
Label#: faitiche23
Format: LP/DL
Release: April 16th 2021

Fortunately for us, Dmytro Nikolaienko agreed to open up the jewellery boxes of his tape-loop archive for his debut album on Faitiche. What came to light was a collection of dreamy glittering gems, masterfully presented using the compositional possibilities of analogue 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 catalogue 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 …

Nikolaienko: Ambianta I

Factish (french / german faitiche) "(...) is a combination of facts and fetishes, and makes it obvious that the two have a common element of fabrication." Bruno Latour, 1999.

Faitiche is a label by Jan Jelinek.

faitiche

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