na: jan jelinek

Jan Jelinek has made a career out of taking microscopic bits of sounds, looping them, and then transforming them into widescreen epics of sound. Hey, everyone has to make a living somehow.

eMusic received Jelinek’s latest today, Tierbeobachtungen. Unlike his last few under his own name (Loop-finding-jazz-records and Kosmischer Pitch), it’s hard to figure out his sound sources this time around. That being said, Jelinek’s music has always defied explication. Even when he was sampling jazz records or working with scraps from the ’70s Kraut underground, the end product rarely left any clues to its origin.

Either way, it’s pretty tempting to use Tierbeobachtungen’s English translation (”animal observations”) as a jumping off point to talk about how the record sometimes sounds a little bit like what you might hear in a nature documentary from the ’70s. As though “Up To My Same Old Trick Again” is the long lost soundtrack to Jacques Costeau exploring the ocean depths or “The Ballad of Soap” is the aural accompaniment to an Oliver Stone-directed African safari documentary.

I could go on, but I don’t want to ruin the rest – the coolest thing about Jelinek’s music is that each listener is invited to craft their own mental movie to go along with the abstraction. Just because I’m dreaming of an antelope getting eaten by a lion, while Oliver Stone films it from 37 angles, doesn’t mean that should be yours. In fact, I kinda hope no one else is thinking of that. It’s rather frightening.