Repress!
Faitiche presents the release of a new album by Masayoshi Fujita & Jan Jelinek (faitiche13). Since their debut (Bird, Lake, Objects, faitiche03, 2010) they have played improvised concerts around the world. Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita prepares his instrument with various percussion elements as well as metal objects and toys, while Jan Jelinek layers loops made using small-scale electronic devices. Schaum (German for froth, foam) is the duo's second album.
"The river, forcing its way through veins between the outposts of the forest, was a great heart. Placidly as it flowed, gently as its descent beat against its vague banks, it brought and gathered sustenance for the busily mediating humus that swelled sunwards in the strangest cell configurations, trees, plants, animals. The silence all round was uncanny and stuck on the ear. Spasmodic squelches, a gurgling in the muddy hollows of the bank beneath overhanging shagginess, the slurping of ominous cavities, that shot out now and again between the long-spun threads of time, like something detonating, testified to the steady monotony of the process. From the forest itself came a crackling rhythm. There the mighty Pan could still be heard to rumble." - from the novel Tropics by Robert Müller (translated by N. Grindell)
*****
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 Tropics - 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. Tropics 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.
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