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Masayoshi Fujita & Jan Jelinek release collaborative album ‘Schaum’

Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita and German glitch pioneer Jan Jelinek collaborate again for the release of their second album ‘Schaum’ (German for froth, foam) via Jelinek’s own imprint Faitiche.

It has been six years since the release of the duo’s first collaborative album “Bird, Lake, Objects”. Their new album presents 8 meditative and ambient tracks, composed of instrumentation and percussion from Masayoshi Fujita with subtle electronic loops and layers from Jan Jelinek.

As the warmer climes start to fade away into autumn “Schaum” provides ample summer time soundscapes to get lost in. We suggest you go right ahead and watch this music video directed by Anthony Sylvester.

“Schaum” is out now on vinyl, CD and digital formats, order a copy from Boomkat.

Read the following correspondence from Jan Jelinek to Masayoshi Fujita about the album.

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.

Corresponding to this, I would like to expand our liner notes to include a quotation from Robert Müller’s novel Tropen – 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. Tropen 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

TRACKLIST

A1. Cin
A2. Helio
A3. Urub
A4. What you should know about me
B1. Vague, yet
B2. Botuto
B3. LesLang
B4. Parades

Discover more about Masayoshi Fujita, Jan Jelinek and Faitiche on Inverted Audio.

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