Browse by Artist: FARBEN

Artist:	FARBEN
Title:	Textstar
Label:	KLANG ELEKTRONIK (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.50
Catalog #:	KLANG 007CD

Classic 2002 release from Jan Jelinek, repressed. "It's hard to put your finger on what, exactly, makes Jan Jelinek's recordings as Farben stand out the way they do. After all, minimal, dubby techno is nearly 10 years old, and while Farben's music is far from a textbook example of the genre, it's undeniably linked to the blissed out, horizontal house of Basic Channel and Chain Reaction. Meanwhile, the 'clicks and cuts' school has popularized the palette of glitches, ticks and pops that characterize Farben's textures. Admittedly, this kind of gritty, grainy techno, or post-techno, or whatever we're going to call it this week, is by now hardly a radical exercise in form. And yet: there's something here you haven't heard before -- not in minimal techno, not in DSP-distressed post-techno, not even in Jelinek's work as Gramm (e.g. 'Personal_Rock' on Source) or under his own name. There's a smoothness, a softness, a billowing-out of sound that stands apart from the angular, pixel-prone minimalism of its contemporaries. You can hear it in 'Love to Love You Baby,' in the way the horn sample darts out from behind parted curtains of crackling static, a come-hither whisper caught on the dividing line between concealing and revealing. It's a hell of a lot sexier than give-up-the-goods-vocal house. Jelinek first combined his interest in jazz samples and moire patterns on Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records (Scape), cutting millisecond-long loops out of jazz recordings from the 50s and 60s and overlaying them until nothing of the source was identifiable, having disappeared into a black hole of crosshatching. In Farben's tracks, though, especially the four new tracks released on the 12" Farben Says: Don't Fight Phrases, the jazz samples are allowed to root and to bloom -- just enough to distinguish their green shoots from the gravelly rhythms in which they've been planted. Just look at the titles and you'll see a difference from Jelinek's peers: while their tracks are formatted like filenames, choked with punctuation and shorn of vowels, Farben tracks suggest a deep romanticism: 'Beautone,' 'So Much Love,' and the inimitable 'Love Oh Love.' It can't be a coincidence that 'Love to Love You Baby' echoes Donna Summer's and Giorgio Moroder's revolutionary cyborg sound: disco ripples run through the shirred fabric of many of these tracks. (And if you never knew Jelinek was a disco fan, well, you never knew Jan, did you?) And 'Live at the Sahara Tahoe' -- not many minimal techno producers have named tracks after Isaac Hayes albums. But this counterintuitiveness is at the heart of Jelinek's practice: 'Actually the recording is not one of my favorites. I always have problems with Hayes' live records, 'cause his arrangements lose their deepness Studio/mixer-virtuosity does not work on stage. Nevertheless Live at the Sahara Tahoe is a famous/popular record of Hayes -- that's the reason I chose this reference. Famous live records and concerts, a gesture of popular music, that stands in contradiction to electronic music.' (If you've ever been to a Tahoe casino, they stand in stark contradiction to most electronic music as well -- but that's another story.) Textstar collects tracks from four of Farben's six EPs: Live at the Sahara Tahoe (1999), Raw Macro (2000), Beautone (2000), and Farben Says: Don't Fight Phrases (2002). This represents the first time that Farben's music is available on CD. In introducing new ears to these sounds, Textstar reinforces Jelinek's position as one of the most innovative, nuanced, and soulful producers working today."

Artist:	FARBEN
Title:	Presents the Preset: The Sampling Matter EP
Label:	KLANG ELEKTRONIK (GERMANY)
Format:	12"
Price:	$10.00
Catalog #:	KLANG 086EP

"It's been a long time... -- that's what Rakim was rapping some time ago. And it's been also a while that we had the honour to present a new record by Mr. Farben himself, Jan Jelinek. This time he Presents The Presets: The Sampling Matter EP to us, 4 oddly named tracks of warmth and beauty that bear the typical Farben trademark sound featuring 'The Presets': Lorenzo Montana (handclaps), Roco DeStefano (fingersnaps), Pucho 'Eddie' Rivera (whistle) and Rose Bellotte (toms). The first track, 'I don't write the title down this time...' is built upon many different sounds: fingersnaps, pizzicato strings, P-Funk synthesizer stabs, all held together by a nice lullaby-like melody."

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