Following up their 2010 record Birds, Lakes, Objects, SHAPE-affiliated vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita and German electronic/glitch artist Jan Jelinek are preparing to release Schaum, another full-length exploration of controlled haze. Jelinek here builds a tide of rich electronic textures around the anchor of Fujita’s subtle instrumental improvisations (the album’s title, meaning “foam” in German, captures the sense here of a complex and wave-like buildup of drones, screeches, and reverb swells). The effect is comparable to the classic piano-and-glitch collaborations of Sakamoto and Noto, but perhaps even deeper, warmer, and more full of detail to get lost in.
In the record’s accompanying notes, Jelinek includes a letter to Fujita explaining a bit of the context for this record. To excerpt:
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 … 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.
Schaum will be available September 8 from Faitiche. Tiny Mix Tapes is happy to premiere the entire album below.
Additionally, you can also revisit the video for album track “Vague, Yet,” created by Anthony Sylvester.
More about: Jan Jelinek, Masayoshi Fujita
