Gramm - Personal Rock

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Jan Jelinek is taking his cues from the micro house sound of labels like Kompakt, Force Tracks or Playhouse - especially its more ambient-leanings strains - as well as from the clicks & cuts and glitch techno approaches pioneered by the likes of Oval, Pole and Vladislav Delay and there's also more than a shade of Basic Channel/Chain Reaction/~scape-like dubbiness. It's a case of innovation through adaptation: Jelinek doesn't so much invent a new musical vocabulary. Rather, he combines his influences in a highly idiosyncratic fashion and distills a distinct and fascinating sound from them.

In a way, Jelinek's releases as Gramm are halfway between his more abstract output under his real name and his relatively dancefloor friendly work as Farben. Personal Rock - Jelinek's first full length album - is tranquil, gentle and melancholy. It's full of skippy, fluttering micro rhythms composed of tiny glitches, clicks and static, the basslines are deep and droning, but house is constantly and explicitly present - not so much through four-to-the-floor beats, but more through the structures of hooks and riffs or typical filter effects. But it's a weirdly spectral and ghostly presence. Personal Rock mirrors the feeling of the rave-comedown: it's like coming home from a club just before it starts to dawn, the rush of dancefloor euphoria slowly ebbing to become a fading, yet still present memory, and you can still feel the basslines and the thumping beats pulsing through your body.