Janek Schaefer

Janek Schaefer is a sound artist and professor from London, whose works sit between the boundaries of ambient, field recordings, electro-acoustic experimentation and social commentary. He released his albums on such labels as Lawrence English’s Room40 (which also released his most recent record Glitter In My Tears), his own audiOH! Recordings, Line, Dekorder and others. Over his career, he has also collaborated with Charlemagne Palestine, Philip Jeck, Robert Hampson and Stephan Mathieu. One of the distinct features of Janek’s sublime, floating soundscapes is their occasional focus on locale and the method of composition behind them. Janek uses custom made turntables so as to forefront the surface noise of the record, thus adding an additional layer of warmth to his either nocturnal or luminous soundscapes. During live performances he builds his narratives using a triphonic turntable and vinyl records. In his interview for the Ear Room, Janek points out that his work is “about space and place and finding sound around him”. This resonates with his background in architecture, which he studied at the Royal College of Art. Janek is a resident of Walton-on-Thames, but his preoccupation with London haunts his records in a variety of forms. One of the examples of this might be the album Lay-By Lullaby released on 12k label, where Janek incorporated location recordings made at midnight above the M3 motorway, not far from the place where J.G. Ballard lived. The record might be interpreted as an exploration of hypnotic nature, of driving along the motorway with London’s cold lights looming in the background, the radio murmuring sounds to keep you awake. There might even be some indirect parallels to Iain Sinclair’s circular wanderings around the M25, so vividly described in his book “London Orbital”. J.G. Ballard frequently resurfaces in Janek’s work as we can obviously see from the track “Inner Space Memorial (For J.G. Ballard)”. There are also quite a few spoken word elements infused in Janek’s music. Despite its sometimes soothing quality, some of the tracks can be treated as a representation of the zeitgeist and the destructive tendencies within humanity. This makes Janek’s music sound like an audio equivalent to Patrick Keiller’s Robinson film series where the ambience of the environment and industrial landscapes are employed to depict the inner problems of London and other parts of the UK. Despite that, there is also a deeply touching and overwhelming sense of light in Schaefer’s music, which makes it comparable in some ways to Harold Budd’s or John Foxx’s ambient output. The sense is usually impersonal and has an element of grandeur about it.

STM 225 is composed from the tracks of 33 releases of Janek’s 22-year recording career. It lets us trace the evolution of his sound and serves as a guide through its marvellous terrains of nightly cityscapes, headlit highways, lush, bright and melancholic harmonies. The mix starts with a 1995 BBC Radio interview, where Janek explains the idea behind the Recorded Delivery record, one of his early pieces delivered by post to the Self Storage Center in London. The piece is basically a recorded journey of a package being delivered to the center. No wonder the extract of it inaugurates the record as it symbolises the relation between Schaefer’s music and environmental perceptions and issues. A big part of the mix encompasses the feature of his sound mentioned in the above paragraph. By floating together with the pieces in this continuous “double decade dubplate” (as Janek himself calls it), we might encounter our own surroundings in different tones and shades. Moreover, the mix also illustrates the versatility and consistency of Janek’s discography and the way it uses different elements to immerse into the world of beauty and caution. This is the third time that we are using Jock McFadyen’s artwork to illustrate our mixes, but his London-centric, sparse, vast textures, vivid cityscapes and subtle light undertones have a similar effect as that of Schaefer’s music. “From Dracula’s Garden” depicts the view across the river Thames from Purfleet and acts as a solemn and tranquil landscape as well as a visual commentary on industrialisation.

Janek Schaefer in records

A special thanks to Lawrence English, the head of Room40, for acting as a medium between the journal and Janek to make this mix happen.