- For the fourth release on his Faitiche label, Jan Jelinek returns to his Farben alias for the first time since 2004, with a mixture of archival material and new productions. It's unclear whether that distinction is by track, or whether all four cuts fuse old and new, but it doesn't really matter. They all have a similar heft and density, like fistfuls of milky agates—clouded with overlapping samples, warbly, burnished with vinyl crackle and plenty of high-end squeak and warble.
As is so often the case with Jelinek, it's hard to say just where his sounds come from. "Rrival Inn (All)" begins with two minutes of modulating drones, an electronic wheeze not so far off from the gloopy modular mayhem captured on Faitiche's Ursula Bogner collection. That introduction gives way to brushed cymbals and chimes that sketch out house music's rhythms without any of its edge. Instead of crisp kicks and handclaps, you get mealy, mushy things like chromatic flute runs, fluttering oscillators and dissonant percussive samples, possibly from flea-market Serialist finds. It's like the soundtrack to some long-lost animated film from the '60s—a Czech documentary about blood vessels, say, or jellyfish.
"Swinn Off" is similar in feel, with lots of clanging, pinging percussion and errant harmonics, but it's less tentative, digging into a deep progression of sampled chords and availing itself of reassuring sub bass. Mapping scavenged jazz to a house clip, it's very Farben, but in its timbral range and its overall structure, it also suggests how much more musical Jelinek has gotten since he started releasing Farben records 12 years ago. "ASpiral Worldorder" uses the same familiar palette of thuds and creaks, with a beautiful bass clarinet lead that burrows its way through like a worm through rotten wood. In fact, it seems to recycle sounds used in "Rrival Inn (All)," but it's far more focused, like a tone poem for a playground full of rusty swings. "Kursbuch 1 & 2" has an actual 303 bassline, almost the only nod to techno convention on the entire record, but from the weird slump of the chords to the omnipresent, incidental din, it's hardly mistakable for anything else.
Tracklist A1 Rrival Inn (All)
A2 Swinn Off
B1 A Spiral Worldorder
B2 Kursbuch 1&2