OUT OF THE BOX #20

Roméo Poirier & The Exposures aka Jan Jelinek (2023)

Out of the Box is an irregular series focusing on seven inch records. It’s an excuse to engage with my collection in a new way, as well as to write about older records and genres we don’t often cover at ACL.

OUT OF THE BOX #20
Roméo Poirier / The Exposures aka Jan Jelinek ~ LOVE/HATE (2023)

I’m still metaphorically chained to my writing desk as I frantically try to make an important deadline, but here’s a quick installment of Out of the Box. LOVE/HATE is my most recent 7” acquisition, which I picked up when seeing Jelinek perform at Public Records in Brooklyn last month.

Jelinek is of course best known for his beloved, era-defining class Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records (2001), but his catalogue and influence are deep, with critically acclaimed work as a solo artist, collaborator, and curator of the Faitiche label, who published this record. The Exposures is a pseudonym that Jelinek flirted with in the early 2000s, beginning with the 2002 12” Jan Jelinek Avec The Exposures, and 2003’s La Nouvelle Pauvreté, both on ~scape, the label founded by Stefan Betke (Pole) and DJ Barbara Preisinger. 2005's Lost Recordings 2000-2004 was billed to just The Exposures, executive produced by Scott Herren (Prefuse 73) and released on the short lived Eastern Developments. That label was founded by Herren, Carlos Niño and others, releasing records between 2002 and 2007, including work by Daedelus, Dabrye, and Eliot Lipp.

Roméo Poirier is probably less well known to our readers, although the profile of this young French-born, Brussels-based artist has been gradually rising. Poirier first popped on my radar around the time of his excellent 2020 LP, Hotel Nota, which caused me to go back to his 2016 debut, Plage Arrière. In ACL weekly #64, I wrote of the vinyl re-press of the original tape release that “the Brussels-based musician, photographer and lifeguard fused strings and electronics for a hallucinogenic ode to Greek beaches.” On the blog, we also reviewed Kystwerk, his 2019 collaboration with Norwegian poet Lars Haga Raavand, which James Catchpole found “swims in gloomy depths before breaching upon a stark coastline.”

Both artists deftly tweak and scramble samples through their modular rigs, producing off-kilter but ultimately endearing and accessible takes on abstract electronic music. Poirier in particular conjures a kind of Mediterranean Fourth World, making his debts to Jon Hassell quite obvious. To these ears he can sound like what Heroin in Tahiti might sound like if they made their tunes with a Eurorack, though Poirier’s work also recalls that of peers like Giuseppe Ielasi, Andrew Pekler, and of course Jelinek himself.

The title LOVE/HATE recalls a famous scene with Radio Raheem in Spike Lee’s classic Do The Right Thing (1989), itself an homage to the 1955 thriller The Night of the Hunter. Love and Hate are not exactly obscure themes, as the liner notes admit, but these two sample-based collages embody the duality of this theme with rare intensity. That said, they don’t lean into the obvious tropes, either.

Despite being titled LOVE/HATE, Roméo Poirier gets top billing on this 7”, so let’s start with the A-side, “Negative Feedback (HATE).” Described as a miniature radio play, Poirier’s composition begins with a queasy drone and a drawn out vocalization of “hate,” before loops of maudlin strings become punctuated by various voices declaring “I hate you.” The intensity of these declarations is juxtaposed to the sentimentality of the music in fascinating ways, a duality that also manifests in the contrast between the old analog samples and the digital textures resulting from Poirier’s manipulations. As the 3:36 composition begins to reach its conclusion, as voice asks “Why are you the way that you are?” setting off a further flurry of declarations of hate. Before working as a solo artist, Poirier was a member of the unconventional French pop group Herzfeld Orchestra, and, with Sarah Dinckel, a member of the indie rock duo Romeo & Sarah. Something of that pop lens might still be legible in even Poirier’s most abstract work, and this is a piece I can see myself returning to and continuing to discover new associations. A lovely piece worth the price of the record on its own.

The b-side, then, is the LOVE side, attributed to the The Exposures [aka Jan Jelinek]. Jelinek was never exactly hiding his involvement in The Exposures, as the billing of the original 12” makes clear, but used the moniker to enact some playful distance via an imaginary group (perhaps not unlike the Hafler Trio, which was originally a duo with Chris Watson but has long been the sole project of Andrew McKenzie). “Collage of Digital Passion,” as this side is called, was originally released as the opening track of The Exposures’s Lost Recordings 2000-2004. The press release at the time made coy reference to a mythical radio broadcast that never was, as the alleged recording session for this broadcast exploring “sexuality and romance in digital postmodernism” was said to have acted as such “an aphrodisiac that turned the recording session into an orgy.” We do love a good press angle.

Jelinek’s side is much more fractured and rhythmic than Poirier’s, whose rhythmic montage is dictated by the lengths of his vocal samples, collaged in an organic way. In contrast, Jelinek is playing with the meter of the grid in his signature fashion, occasionally falling into the kind of loping repetitive loops that will have you checking to make sure your record isn’t skipping. Samples of the word “love,” sung rather than spoken, are repeated, conjuring a melodic progression alongside the stuttering beats. Clocking in at just a smidge over thee minutes, the B-side too begs for repeat listens. Overall, a captivating release of two conceptually linked but formally distinct compositions made two decades apart. Recommended.