Take Me, I’m Yours marks the first full‑length collaboration between Alan Abrahams and Jan Jelinek, and it arrives already resisting easy categorisation. Released on Jelinek’s faitiche imprint, the album begins with a body of raw material that bears all the hallmarks of Abrahams’ history as Portable and Bodycode: multi‑layered songs, intertwining vocal lines, echoes of classic vocal house and diasporic soul. Abrahams, now based in Paris after formative years in South Africa, London and Lisbon, recorded a series of sketches that ranged from wordless chants to lyric‑driven tracks, then handed them over with no clear sense of how they might be transformed. In Berlin, Jelinek subjected these recordings to a rigorous studio process, erasing chords, paring rhythms back to flickers and turning the perceived “finished song” into a quarry of phonemes, breaths and emotional residues.
The pair’s relationship has roots in the early 2000s, when Abrahams invited Jelinek to perform at one of his Süd Electronic parties, the London‑born label/club project that helped define his approach to experimental dance music. From that encounter the idea of working together emerged slowly, without a fixed brief. “It started as an experiment, and over the past few years grew from a few tracks into this album,” Abrahams recalls, describing the recording of his initial parts as a “tantalizing” process precisely because he had no control over what would come next. That mutual trust becomes audible in the finished pieces: Jelinek feels free to strip away harmonic safety nets and obvious grooves, concentrating almost exclusively on the grain of Abrahams’ voice and the ambiguous rhythmic micro‑events hidden inside it.
Jelinek talks about hearing something “fragile” in that voice, “moments of doubt and dark premonitions” that run counter to the serotonin rush often associated with vocal house. On a track like “Forever,” the original song structure nodded toward that lineage, but the way Abrahams’ voice seemed on the verge of breaking suggested another reading - “a singer in the moment of an awakening,” as Jelinek puts it. His reworking heightens those tensions through arrhythmic synth modulations, time‑stretching and the quiet insertion of concrete sounds, so that what might once have been a club anthem turns into a suspended, almost diaristic interior monologue. Elsewhere, wordless chanting is reframed as a kind of unstable drone, the gaps and overlaps between layers becoming more important than any single melodic line.
Throughout Take Me, I’m Yours, the production maintains a delicate balance between physical and abstract listening. Subtle pulses and ghost‑beats, often implied more than stated, give the tracks a bodily pull, but the usual cues of kick‑drum insistence and harmonic resolution are either attenuated or absent. The ear is drawn instead to timbral shifts, to the way a syllable elongates under time‑stretching, to a synth modulation that briefly brushes against dissonance before fading into the background. Concrete sounds - environment fragments, mechanical clicks, unidentifiable rustles - act as small apertures to an external world that the music otherwise keeps at arm’s length. The result feels very much in dialogue with faitiche’s broader catalogue of “sonic docufictions”: works that thrive on oscillation between clarity and ambiguity, documentary trace and studio invention.
What ultimately distinguishes the album is that it never treats the voice as just another sample, nor treats songwriting as a mere pretext for deconstruction. Abrahams’ performances retain a palpable emotional charge even when their linguistic content is obscured, and Jelinek’s interventions are geared toward amplifying, not neutralising, those undercurrents. Take Me, I’m Yours becomes, in this sense, a dialogue rather than a remix project - a space where one artist’s long engagement with the physicality of singing meets another’s sustained inquiry into the abstraction of digital sound. Neither a “typical” Abrahams record nor a classic Jelinek album, it occupies a third, fertile territory in between, inviting listeners to move through it with the same mix of trust, curiosity and openness that shaped its making.
