Berlin’s Jan Jelinek and Japan’s Asuna have announced their collaborative debut, Signals Bulletin, a five-track LP scheduled to release April 5 on Jelinek’s label, Faitiche. 

Jelinek and Asuna first met when they gave a concert at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Asuna’s home city. “He performed the organ drones and I immediately knew I wanted to collaborate with him,” Jelinek recalls. “Six years and five meetings later, we completed Signals Bulletin.” 

The album includes both joint improvisations and compositions, recorded in Berlin, Kanazawa, and Kyoto. Whether using prepared organ, Casio keyboards, or mechanical plastic toys, Asuna creates rich textures of sound that barely change over long stretches of time. “It is a music without breaks,” Jelinek says. “For a while, I was unsure how my loops made using modular synthesizers and live sampling fitted here—until I realized the role I had to take in this duet: I would provide the rhythmically pulsating foundation over which his dense continuums could unfold.”

The result, we’re told, is “harmonically drifting superclusters that put us into a meditation-like state.” 

Artwork is sourced from a photograph showing a collection of doodle art from Asuna.

Faitiche has pressed the album onto limited edition vinyl. In advance of the April 5 release, you can stream “Relief, Pt.1” below, with pre-order of the vinyl version here. 

Tracklisting

01. Relief, Pt.1

02. Pulsating Primary Structure

03. Fountain

04. How A Spiral Works

05. Blinking Of Countless Lines