Farben - Textstar
Keeping up with the music coming out of Germany these days requires a cheat sheet, a chart by which you can cross-reference the aliases and monikers used by the digital technicians who scatter beats across the different musical terrains. Jan Jelinek is one of these players, and his work as Farben would fall squarely in the section on the chart labeled "microhouse."
Textstar is a collection taken from a series of EPs that he has done as Farben during the last few years and works exceptionally well as a cohesive whole. Textstar is a watery dub affair, sprinkled with washes of melody, thin slices of orchestral samples, and chirping digital effects. These are constructed experiments -- songs which have no natural occurance -- and yet they slip and ooze with organic pulsations. They are aligned to the natural rhythms of the human body, the click and thrum of the blood and organs doing their work, and because of this immediate connectivity, they have an alluring warmth.
"Farben Says: Love to Love you Baby" is a looped slice of time, a tiny sliver of existence that captures a moment of acoustic guitar, a squirt of brass, a shivering echo of a sub-woofer from the next room, a quirk of electronic melody, a chattering loop of woodblock, and a drifting miasma of lost smog. It is the arrangement of these pieces -- cut and recut -- by Jelinek that transforms these disparate moments into a six minute travelogue.
"Bayreuth" is sweet clickity. Digital chirps and the tiny clattering of metal against metal rise over a subtle darkness as a sweet melody stretches itself across the open spaces. Glitch patterns continue to pop as the other elements rise in strength and everything becomes a charted line of brain wave patterns -- music to accompany the brain's movement from deep slumber to REM and fanciful dreaming.
An upright bass loops around blips and a shuffling drum pattern in "Farben Says: Love Oh Love." A drifting radio melody takes us back to the 1950s and the whole shuffling track comes alive with a shimmer. "Farben Says: So Much Love" is the mantra whispered by a faint female voice over a determined bass line. This track becomes a torch song heard faintly in the digitized background of our modern existences.
"Beautone" is built like something from a Wolfgang Voigt track. It begins with a simple downbeat click on a four on the floor pattern with a ringing five note melody echoing in the background. More glitchery and digital elements filter in and compete for your attention with the crescendoing melody. And then an orchestra comprised of flutes and strings descends from the ceiling and the entire room becomes a futuristic disco/concert hall.
Labeling Textstar as "microhouse" gives it a convenient place in the record store, but that fails to give any measure to Jelinek's love for how rhythm finds its way into your heart. Textstar may be carefully calculated in its digital creation, but it is flesh and blood which drives the samplers and beat-boxes. Listen to it. Your body will know.
Klang Elektronik [2002]
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