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Dusted Features
Every Friday, Dusted Magazine publishes a series of music-related lists compiled by our favorite artists. This week: Jan Jelinek and Bracken.
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Listed: Jan Jelinek + Bracken
Jan Jelinek
There a few musicians working today who qualify under the intended definition of "unique" - being the only one. Berlin artist Jan Jelinek has created a genre unto himself over the course of his last two albums, 2005's Kosmicher Pitch and last year's Tierbeobachtungen. Electronic in nature, mechanical in practice, yet stitched together in effect, his layers of loops feel more like a quilt than a house of cards. Perhaps that's why he's our favorite soundtrack during catnaps. Jelinek's closest comparisons might be Otis Jackson Jr. and Stars of the Lid, in that order, and to top things off, the man doesn't have a MySpace page. Talk about unique.
If you live in Europe, you'll have a chance to check out Jelinek in person this month. He plays Feb. 9 in Copenhagen at Komponent, and Feb. 17 in Bielefeld, Germany, at Kamp.
1. Spacemen 3 - Dream Weapon
LoFi-Esoterica. (Which is maybe a contradiction ...). Anyway, probably the most hypnotic record I ever listened to.
2. Terence Dixon - Live in Detroit
LoFi DetroitTechnoSunRaFuturism. Or is it claustrophobic future-garage-punk?
3. Oval - Systemisch
LoFi-C86-Avantgarde. No record ever reached such a emotional abstraction.
4. Stevie Wonder - For Once in My Life
LoFi-Sexuality. Lovesongs without any sexual desire. Stevie created a new genre: Romantical Euphoriaism.
5. Harmonia - Musik von Harmonia
LoFi-Psychedelica. Actually the opposite of Pink Floyd: Free of any bombast.
6. Red Krayola - God save the Red Krayola and all who will sail with it
LoFi-LoFi. Maybe the blueprint for bands on Cherry Red records. Hmm, not sure, if this right.
7. Eric Dolphy - Out to Lunch
HiFi-Godardism. Please combine this music with every French film of the early 60s.
8. Marine Girls - Lazy Ways
LoFi-RedKrayola. Please combine the words I wrote for Red Krayola and Bobby Hutcherson.
9. EMD - CNN
LoFi-MiamiBassConceptionalism Architects should listen to this.
10. Bobby Hutcherson - Patterns
No-LoFi. It's like with the Beatles: If you don't like this record, you must have a bad character.
Bracken
Like many of his Anticon brethren, Bracken is the alias (no pun intended) for a lone guy - Chris Adams - whose music blurs the lines between hip hop and half a dozen or so other genres. He put his name on the map during the 90s and early 00s as one half of Hood (the other half was his brother Richard), who over the course of their unrecognized and fascinating career morphed from a loopy daydream pop act into an instrumental hip hop duo. Adams' work as Bracken picks up from right around Hood's artistic peak, and works its way from there. Bracken's debut record, We Know About the Need is out now on Anticon, though iTunes would have you believe that it was released in 3001.
1. This Heat - This Heat
Worth the entrance price alone for "24 track loop". Tape mangling ingenuity at it's finest (not counting their "Health and Efficiency" twelve). If you're ever feeling bored why not sluice out an old meat packing factory freezer, call it "cold storage" and record an LP in there? it worked for these guys.
2. Faust - The Faust Tapes
A pre-pubescent introduction to the fact that the musical experiments that fail are often the best bits. Put 'em all together and flog them at a low low price and you've got a best seller....and a good, honest staple of the bargain bins for many years to come.
3. Aphex Twin - "Windowlicker"
It just annoys me how good this is, bloody show off.
4. The Dead C - Harsh 70's Reality
I normally pick out the Helen/Bury EP as my pick of their honed brand of deconstructed free form rock sludge but i'll give this mightily relentless document the nod today, I dunno, I'm just in that kinda mood.
5. Anything Timbaland's even thought about producing
Doesn't even really need saying but the guy could produce Daniel o'Donnell and have the whole world shaking their booties and yelling about roofs being on fire and the like.
6. cLouddead - cLouddead
I can imagine our three heroes reading this and saying "oh, God, not again, let it go", and it's true that Messrs Madson, Wolf and Drucker have continued to move in all sorts of exciting and unexpected directions ever since those fabled 10"s. But this is the one that'll stick with me for the moment as it kick started a whole heap of musical adventure.
7. Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 - "Sports Car"
I've got John Peel to thank for this one (and most other discoveries to be honest). I think I put my back out trying to run across the room to record it off the radio. A ludicrously ambitious and totally out there form of guitar music that only a certain strain of Bay Area brain wrongs were able to pluck from the stratosphere.
8. PIL - Metal Box
Okay, okay, he might be a property developer in LA now but you're not gonna take this away from him.
9. Steve Reich - Music for 18 Musicians
As just one example, there's countless more corkers of course. I could listen to this sort of stuff all day because, well, most of it goes on all day.
10. White Noise - White Noise
Always remember: if you've got big record label money behind you, you've got to get the right producer/engineer to really give those songs of your that chart friendly zing. Who did these guys choose to help out? Delia Derbyshire! And the result? a wildly unfoccussed but ear boggling masterclass in tape splicing coupled with a such a devil may care attitude that it's inexplicable how it ever managed to get a release. Of course it's also a work of genius.
By Dusted Magazine
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