From the album “Madvillainy” (2004)
It all started with a Secret Thirteen mix in 2014. Before this I’d never heard of Jan Jelinek, and truthfully, the only reason I even gave it a chance was superficial – the disparate track list, and that I recognized some of the names on it. Incorporating Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Dean Blunt and Bernard Parmegiani, amongst others, into a coherent set, that covers a sixty-year time span in music, was some undertaking.
That Jelinek managed it with some aplomb led to me to giving his own material a look.
Fortunately, going through his catalogue didn’t seem as daunting as first dipping your toe into Bob Dylan, which is a rite of passage for everyone, contending with Richard D. James’ various Pseudonyms and SoundCloud dumps, or the labyrinth discographies of Coil or Muslimgauze. On the latter, Bryn Jones may have died in 1999, but he still remains prolific. However, Jelinek has multiple other aliases, so there was still a fair amount of ground to be covered.
After chipping away at it for ten years, in a process as satisfying as collecting Subbuteo teams back in the day, I reckon I’ve narrowed it down to a few essential releases in Jelinek’s catalogue that are musts and good entry points for the uninitiated.
The theme with all of Jelinek’s works is repurposing, first deconstruction of jazz instrumentals into fragments and then reconstructing them into a new perspective, fused with abrupt glitching and other electronic effects and fluctuations from a programmable drum machine. To simplify, quoting that narrated sample used by The Orb in Little Fluffy Clouds “layering different sounds on top of each other” or, to use my old man’s hyper-specific interpretation of the genre; “that’s LSD music”. What I won’t do is refer to it as microhouse, a hideously twee, lazy journalese term favoured by pretentious wankers at Pitchfork or the Guardian music review pages.
The onus on Improvisation and Edits Tokyo is soothing ambiances contorted by static-glitch, think Kompakt’s Pop Ambient series and Brian Eno’s Music For Airports meeting the piercing fragmentation of Muslimgauze’s Iranair Inflight Magazine. There’s maximum fruit machine freneticism on the chaotic “Hot Barbeque” and “Barbeque Version”. Those two outliers aside the looping samples are predominantly brass rather than base, creating salubriously sombre melodies on “The New Anthem” “Watch What Happens” and “Straight Life”, while the density of layering on “The Post-Anthem” fosters a persistent drone that reminded me of Do While by Oval.
The Textstar+ remaster from 2022 is peak Jelinek. Some offerings have a kindship with DJ Sprinkles’ penchant for muffled baselines, see “T.Microsystems” and “Silikon”. “FF” is a seat groover and toe tapper with a delightful twang and on “Farben Says So Much Love” the tempo is jacked up to tits with a wicked repeating baseline while the groove is imbued by another layer of base. “farben Says Love To Love You Baby” follows a similar pattern but with strings being punctured by a truncated sax sample. The prominence and the abruptness of the glitch used on “Suntouch Edit” wouldn’t feel out of place on Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records.
Side note – Soulseeking this one to ensure you get tracks that were on the original Starbox release but that are omitted on the reissue is a good idea. There’s five of them missing (likely due to copywrite); “At The Golden Circle Stockholm Vol. 1, 1965”, “Live At The Roxy, 1984”, “Raw Macro”, “Loop Exposure” and “Bayreuth”.
Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records delivers on the title’s promise, melodies are created by abbreviated repeating samples, and are mostly piano based, except where specified on “Moire (strings)”. “They Them” has deep baselines punctuated by static before it’s embellished by a piano loop, “Them Their” uses a similar structure to create a softer tone. This record proves how versatile sampling one instrument can be, when the surrounding embellishments and pacing are altered. “Rock In The Video Age” borrows from the austere industrialist aesthetic on Basic Channel’s Radiance EP. “Do Dekor” has the lot, rhythm set by static, simple organ chords and fragments of a warm baseline just begging to be brought into ascendency throughout.
Bandcamp release blurbs are often drably po-faced, the one for Do you know Otahiti, however, was at least concise:
“Do you know Otahiti? is a twofold collage; it combines unreleased material with fragments taken from Kennen Sie Otahiti?, a radio collage produced for SWR Radio in 2012 on the theme of fictional and real travelogues”
Not a great sell, is it? But don’t be put off by how naff that sounds. Conceptually “Do you know Otahiti” comes dangerously close to a wankery art installation, but escapes this burning cross as the splices of German narration are married to an ominous echo vocal effect, which belies the (likely?) banality. A dramatic shift to a looped vocal creates an atmospheric unease, before the track tapers off. This would not work in English, I guarantee it, some Cockney geezer saying “I went to Butlins with the kids and got shat on by a seagull” over such an interesting score would be Damien Hirst try-hard cringe. Comparatively the rest of EP feels less experimental but regal. “Live at Frameworks Munich 2012” utilises a dainty mellow percussion contradicted by creepy buglike tapping sounds. “Live at Avantjazz” sees the vibraphone of collaborator Masayoshi Fujita take centre stage to create a zen Japanese garden ambiance. Japan meets Germany may have not been a hit eighty years ago, but it is here.
The best thing I can say about Jelinek’s material is how moreish it is. Traversing from one Jelinek release to another over the past decade has been akin to cleaning down the back of the sofa and finding a two-pound coin, repeatedly. It’s a process that’s made me richer in the way that matters.
From the album “The In Crowd” (1965)
From the single “The Water Margin / Fusion” (1995)
Having never taken to the trio of Christopher Nolan Batman films, or most of his movies, I wanted the new Robert Pattinson Batman movie, named, in a stunning bit originality, The Batman, to impress me.
Ugh. It tried too hard to present Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne as tortured and broody, instead he just came across as a misanthropic, often po-faced, rich gobshite that you didn’t want to root for. The grimy aesthetic was laid on a tad too thick that it became a pastiche of movies that did it well – say Taxi Driver. Not even Zoe Kravitz’s skin-tight outfit could save what was an incredibly dull affair.
As with most episodic based comic book adaptations the narrative’s scope was ill-fitting for the big screen. Even at almost three hours in length, The Batman was an unseemly mess of things just happening abruptly or nothing happening at all, akin to the stages of a suicidally obese person trying to cram themselves into sportscar. At least Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin was so dreadful you could laugh at it. Thankfully Batman: The Animated Series is still around and in the Batman genre it has yet to be bettered.
But among the wreckage of The Batman Colin Farrell’s turn as The Penguin was worth salvaging. Eventually marginalised by the main antagonist, The Riddler, in the film, at least Lauren LeFranc recognised Farrell’s performance deserved closer examination and developed a mini-series charting The Penguin’s attempts to work his way up the Mafioso food chain to kingpin. It’s a low bar to clear, but this was always likely to be far more interesting than Bruce Wayne deliberating whether he can face leaving his mansion on a Tuesday.
Watching this mini-series, it occurred to me that some actors could use assistance to embrace the method and that Farrell is surely one of them. I had no idea Farrell was playing the Penguin during The Batman. In fact, I was left completely perplexed as to when he was going to appear. This is closest The Batman got to suspense, was Farrell The Riddler? Until about halfway through I needed to go to the loo (did I mention The Batman’s long?), and while there checked the cast list on Wikipedia.
I’ll admit this notion of Farrell’s range being limited owes to his movie career having more turkeys than Christmas. His track record of playing American characters is particularly grim. Lowlights include Widows, that movie he did with Denzel where Denzel borrowed Samuel L Jackson’s afro from Unbreakable, and sadly it’s impossible to forget the massive abortions that were the Total Recall and Miami Vice remakes. Little doubt I’m being harsh here, most top Hollywood actors simply get offered too much money to not make too many forgettable movies.
Farrell has fared better in Martin McDonagh’s flicks, often playing a cocksure Irishman; The Banshees of Inisherin, Seven Psychopaths and In Bruges. The Lobster was quirky, and The Gentlemen, while typical Guy Ritchie gangster fare, was amusing. But even here there are blights on Farrell’s resume, the laughably bad Alexander, though Val Kilmer doing an Irish accent is an event, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
Quick rant – The Killing of a Sacred Deer is one of the worst movies to be released in the last decade. It’s a cynical concoction of edgy situationism by a wanker art student trying to impress their mates. The agonisingly slow pacing, absurd premise, robotic dialogue and every character appearing to be on a cocktail of temazepam and ketamine was exasperating. That most of the main characters survived at the end was the decomposing cherry on top of this stinking turd.
Anyway, I’ve strayed from the Lede here. The Penguin as a mini-series allows for a comprehensive vision of The Batman’s world. HBO doesn’t insist on sanitized language where a mainstream superhero movie does to maximize its audience and profitability. There’s also no linear hero arc to squeeze into a truncated timespan. The Penguin follows cliques of venal Machiavellian scum or crazed lunatics trying to outflank one another, headlined by the insane Sofia Falcone, who perpetually teeters on the edge of going full Hannibal Lecter. Placing The Penguin among this lot doesn’t make you root for him as an anti-hero, but the context does help you accept his predicament, and it provides genuine twists.
This iteration of The Penguin is so effective because it’s faithful to the character’s legend, he is grotesque, but crucially, unlike Danny DeVito’s version, not comically. Oz Cobb became The Penguin by being weathered by years of violence and physical ailments. The design of his face, think Tony Soprano, only fucked up, displays this history – a meticulous and extensive curation of pothole hole sized acne scars and chibs. It’s rougher than a binman’s arse – as though he’s been reversed over by a road grinder several times. The body girth is that of a slovenly hedonist, mixed with an increasing lack of strenuous physical activity limited by a gnarly clubbed foot.
Existing under all that rubber and putting on hours of slap every day was surely humbling, to a degree, for a handsome dude like Farrell. But it’s also clear that this commitment to the part created a kindship with the character, as though the costume took possession over Farrell, cajoling him to elevate his performance to match the audacity and detail of the phenotype (another great example of this is Robert Downey Jr’s ironic “blackface” in Tropic Thunder). We know this as most of the physical inflections of Farrell’s performance is not as a direct result of the makeup itself – the impeccably thick New York accent, inadvertent shoulder flexes, facial tics and tongue flicks and the signature waddling gait.
There were many problems with The Batman, but one of its worst is it put Pattinson, who was supposed to take centre stage, at a real disadvantage. He was only given a mediocre script and tired concept, where Farrell had the task of physically becoming someone else. Credit to him, he rose to it. This juxtaposition is a good reminder of the performance paradox – people are more capable than you imagine but that testing them is often the only way to reveal it.
Wichita Lineman Was A Song I Once Heard 
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