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.
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Additionally, you can also revisit the video for album track “Vague, Yet,” created by Anthony Sylvester.