Jan Jelinek’s ‘Kosmischer Pitch’: Loops in Constant Motion

Jelinek’s 2005 album warps time through shifting, eroding textures. The vinyl reissue arrives as he prepares for a rare performance at the Lodge Room.

Known for working under various aliases — Gramm’s dub-infused minimalism, Farben’s deconstructed house, the fictional composer Ursula Bogner, and G.E.S.’s explorations of sampling politics — Berlin producer/composer Jan Jelinek has spent his artistic life investigating the spaces where sound begins to break apart. His approach is one of subtraction and decay, stripping away the familiar until only pulse, atmosphere and the suggestion of structure remain.

Jelinek’s releases under his own name trace a path through minimalism and abstraction. The classic clicks-and-cuts album Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records (2001) dismantled jazz samples into flickering, rhythmic fragments. As his sound evolved, he moved further from recognizable structures, letting abstraction take the lead. Later albums like Tierbeobachtungen (2006) and SEASCAPE – polyptych (2022) layer field recordings, voice synthesis and live processing to reshape sound into something fluid and elusive.

Which brings us to Kosmischer Pitch, now celebrating its 20th anniversary with a vinyl edition. The album captures Jelinek at a moment of transition, filtering the drifting hypnosis of German kosmische musik through his own methods of repetition, fragmentation and sonic layering. Across the album he introduces sets of problems that require his hand to solve: how to evoke movement without strict percussion, let structure emerge from decay or stretch a phrase until it feels alive. Rather than imposing rigid solutions, he allows sound to resolve itself through subtle transformation, guiding motifs just enough to keep them from unraveling completely. Rhythms pulse but never settle, tones shimmer and dissolve and melodies hover at the edge of recognition, always shifting before they take shape.

David Bowie was a fan, especially of the track “Lithiummelodie 1.” He described it as “a strange and bewitching seven-minute wordless composition that slowly builds from a sparse industrial beginning to something far more organic and mesmerising. “The track builds layer upon layer using samples that seem fairly unremarkable in themselves, but which culminate in a sonically rich piece with an energetic melody.” Added Bowie, “I couldn’t resist scatting a vocal over ‘Lithiummelodie 1’ as I listened, (well I am a singer that loves a little scat in the privacy of my own home) but it got away.” 

To get a sense of Jelinek’s breadth, consider Zwischen, a radio play built from twelve sound poetry collages that use interview answers from public figures. But instead of focusing on their statements, the piece isolates the moments between them — “silences, pauses for breath and hesitations in which the interviewees utter non-semantic sound particles,” as described in the release notes. These fragments, usually dismissed as verbal imperfections, take on a new role, triggering a synthesizer that overlays electronic tones onto the voice, creating “twelve acoustic structures.”

The release notes describe how “we all know the speaker’s fate: you falter, you mispronounce, there are breaks, silences and false starts,” citing Roland Barthes’ comparison of such gaps to “the knocks made by a malfunctioning motor.” Normally disconcerting, these delays and hesitations form Zwischen’s core, transforming from speech errors into poetic, structural elements that reshape our understanding of language and sound.

Jan Jelinek brings his evolving structures and fractured works to the Lodge Room in Highland Park this spring, joined by Andrew Pekler, a fellow explorer of shifting sonics. While Jelinek lets repetition dissolve form, Pekler constructs imaginary environments, layering sampled fragments into surreal landscapes. A frequent collaborator with Jelinek, Pekler has released work on labels like Faitiche, Kranky, Shelter Press and Senufo Editions.

Andrew Pekler & Jan Jelinek
USA Spring 2025
April 20th New York
April 22 – Los Angeles
April 23 – San Francisco
April 24 – Portland
April 25 – Seattle
April 26 – Denver