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faitiche

Dark Ambient: Unchill

Lyl radio september 2021
One hour with Faitiche label founder and producer Jan Jelinek for the first half and Brussels’ musician/coast connoisseur Roméo Poirier for the second.

TEIJI ITO - Operation Hourglass
OLIVIA BLOCK - October, 1984 (excerpt)
JAN JELINEK - The Raw and The Cooked (Zwischen/Raum)
DOUGLAS LILBURN - Welcome Stranger
FIELD RECORDING - Ano Korakiana by night
DAVID BEHRMAN - Touch Tones
NIKOLAIENKO - Well-Degraded
MARK FELL - INTRA-3
OLLY W. WILSON - Cetus
TERRENCE DIXON - Silent Treatment
FIELD RECORDING - Madrid 
ROMÉO POIRIER - Untitled
FIELD RECORDING - Sferic in Sant Carles de la Ràpita 
CURD DUCA - Happy
FIELD RECORDING - Castellón 
KAT ONOMA - Comme son nom l’indique (film excerpt)
WALDECK - Spy Like An Angel (edit)
CURD DUCA - Touch (edit)
CURD DUCA - Blue
COLTRANE IN THE STUDIO - (edit)
ROMÉO POIRIER - Untitled
FIELD RECORDING - Gijon 
THE AVALANCHES - Summer Crane
JIM BACKUS & FRIENDS - Delicious
PHILIPPE POIRIER - Untitled
PHILIPPE POIRIER - Aller-Retour
RODOLPHE BURGER & OLIVIER CADIOT - Hotel Robinson
JAN JELINEK - Ice 695
DON CHERRY - Degi-Degi
ANDREW PEKLER - Sunset-Sunrise
FIELD RECORDING - Madrid

https://lyl.live/episode/temple-of-faitiche-28

Temple of Faitiche - Jan Jelinek & Roméo Poirier (Lyl radio)

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

A Year Ago

https://towheadrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/floor-9

Floor 9

Forest Management - Wilson

Lost inside the infirmary of my sleepless little mind

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

R$N Recs brings you the debut EP from ILHA: Canadian producer, African Ghost Valley, & Mozambican artist, Nandele, their inaugural release, Lava Around the Floating Island, is a masterclass in synthesized ambience. Lead single, MA118 provides celestial reverberations, soothing our ears before the forward propulsion of the kick drum finally drops us into the mesmeric groove. The retro 80s bassline is complimented by a lush melody & metallic chords that drive this jauggernaut onwards.

https://www.instagram.com/nandelemaguni/
https://soundcloud.com/nndle
https://www.facebook.com/nandelemaguni/


https://www.instagram.com/africanghostvalley
https://soundcloud.com/african-ghost-valley
https://www.facebook.com/africanghostvalley
https://twitter.com/aghostvalley

Lava Around The Floating Island EP

Buy/Stream

ILHA - MA118 [R$N33S]

Does Spring Hide Its Joy v2.3

Does Spring Hide Its Joy v2.3 (feat. Stephen O'Malley & Lucy Railton)

mood

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

The caves of Botuto loomed ominously above the sea, their black, murky depths swallowed up the water and sight was lost amidst the darkness. The waves roared coarsely in his ears as they clattered against the rugged cliff face, this was unchartered territory, no human had ever entered the Botuto. They would soon find out how deep the rabbit hole beneath the water would go. 

'Schaum' is the latest release to emerge from the Faitiche records camp. It sees masayoshi Fujita and Jan Jelinke get weird and wonderful across a sprawling assortment of music which comes in at just under an hour.

Schaum

PREMIERE: Masayoshi Fujita & Jan Jelinek - Botuto [Faitiche]

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

by Masayoshi Fujita & Jan Jelinek 
"Bird, Lake, Objects" (2010 Faitiche)

I'll change your life / Masayoshi Fujita & Jan Jelinek

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.