From Boomkat:
"Hallucinated by an anonymous figure simply described as a "veteran experimental sonic alchemist", Jaan's debut album is a genre-dissolved lattice of jazzy instrumental outbursts, environmental recordings, dizzy fourth world experiments and tape saturated drones. Deep, soundtrack-indebted gear that splashes down somewhere between the Heat Crimes and Stroom axes, if that makes sense.
We can't tell you who put this one together, but the project's anonymity is the reason why it sounds the way that it does. Jaan is described as "a collective of one", and the music is informed by the very act of digging - not searching thru keywords on Bandcamp, but leafing through dusty yellowed sleeves and molded tape boxes excavating sounds that aren't easily explained by surnames and associations. And honestly, even if we knew who Jaan was, the album would still have us guessing; 'Baghali' unfolds fractally, curving from sketch to offhand idea in a manner that doesn't (and shouldn't) make any real sense. 'Mashid' sounds like a table of electronic instruments attempting to rebuild some kind of imagined half-speed jazz outline, with bassy harmonics plucked methodically and piped thru gentle but destabilizing effects, and 'Pomegranate Garden' might have come not just from a different record but a different time period and a different continent, stitched together from disintegrated Arabesque twangs, Carpenter-like analog growls and tape damaged hand drum rhythms. It's music that wouldn't hang so well together unless there was someone with serious experience at the helm, and Jaan makes damn sure that it plays like a continuous thought - as if we're hearing a layered mix of interconnected ideas and sound that lead us thru a very particular soundscape, rather than a set of random tracks"
Cavernous opener 'Scented Feathers' plugs up the space between spaghetti western and film noir soundtracks, slowing down melancholy brass vamps, plucked footsteps and canned themes and propelling the ooze with roughly outlined, vanishing rhythms. And before we've even had the chance to fully separate each sound, we're rerouted with 'Purple Watermelon', introduced to a new climate with washing waves, what sounds like a ghatam or a khol, and asphyxiated reeded wails. Jaan purposefully mashes reality, pulling the sound away from a recognizable scene or locale; according to the press release, they're operating "between Greenland, the Middle East and Europe," so there's a lot of ground to potentially cover. Yet despite its virtual placelessness, 'Baghali' feels rich and lived-in, a record that's made from intentional gestures and chewable experiences rather than fetishized stares from the other side of a cultural gulf. It's almost knowingly erroneous, crumpled with inconsistencies and curiosities that prevent you from mistaking it for an ethnographic capture. On 'JuJu', the processing sounds like a digital stream copping out, and on 'Fragments of Home', the hesitant North African street rhythm is ruptured by detuned baroque piano splinters and a tempered power electronics performance.
A cockerel crows in the distance and cheap motorcycles growl past the frame, and Jaan fades in 'This is the Year', a dimly lit, saturated jazz cue that dissolves into a chorus of whirrs and 'Eraserhead'-like atmospheres".