masayoshi fujita & jan jelinek: schaum

Faitiche presents the release of Schaum by Masayoshi Fujita & Jan Jelinek. Since their debut Bird, Lake, Objects (FAITICHE 003CD, 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 or foam) is the duo's second album. Jelinek writing to Fujita about the album: "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. 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?' (2012) and 'Dialoge zur Anthropologie' (2013): artificial field recordings, jungle and rain forest settings that do not hide their staged, fictional character. 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. 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. 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. With best regards, Jan Jelinek" Comes in hard-cover book-style packaging.