Jan Jelinek
Questions and Answers

About the Artist

Jan Jelinek’s live performances are a kind of quiet rebellion against traditional musical form—composed of fragmentary textures, half-erased melodies, and rhythms that seem to gently forget themselves mid-loop. He doesn’t play in the conventional sense so much as sculpt with sound, often building collages from tiny grains of audio—a method he once likened to “working with sound dust.” Known for his deeply abstract style under both his name and aliases like Farben and Gramm, Jelinek came to prominence in the early 2000s by translating the familiar—pop, jazz, dub—into eerie sonic afterimages. His concerts are meditative yet cerebral, frequently accompanied by immersive visuals and experimental projections, and he has a habit of letting tracks evolve so gradually that audiences only notice the transformation once it’s already complete. A fan-favorite moment involved an unexpected collab with Masayoshi Fujita, where Jelinek’s granular loops met live vibraphone in a dialogue that felt more like a whispered argument between machines and ghosts. Berlin-born, he also co-founded the improvisation trio Groupshow and runs the Faitiche label, a platform known for music that often blurs the line between composition and conceptual art. And yes, he once gave an entire set with what looked like a broken mixer, but no one noticed—probably because whatever he was doing sounded better broken anyway.