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Fennesz

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Fennesz, “Mosiac” (Touch, 2024)

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One thing that I particularly love about Christian Fennesz is that he only seems to surface with a new solo album when he has undergone some sort of significant creative breakthrough and has a fresh new vision to share. In recent years, those masterworks have settled into a reliable rhythm of roughly one every five years and Mosaic is the latest installment in that incredible run. Notably, Fennesz did not have clear vision when he began work on these pieces, but instead devoted himself to assembling the album piece by piece every single day until “the full picture” was revealed and the vision felt complete. 

Interestingly, the album is described as an echo of Venice in which the passing time has made “the division between the land, the horizon and the deep blue sea is more extreme,” but it feels more like a descendant of Endless Summer to me. In this instance, however, the shimmering, sun-dappled beauty of the beach feels like a bleary and elusive memory of a past summer fitfully darkened by glimpses of a weightier melancholy. That said, the beach vibes prove to be impressively tenacious, so Mosaic feels more like the bittersweet final days of a summer on the seaside than it does a rueful reflection on happier past days.

I consider myself to be a somewhat devoted fan of Christian Fennesz’s work, but I confess that I initially found myself a bit underwhelmed by the three pieces that were released in advance of this album, as they all felt more pleasant than revelatory at first listen. Once the full album was released, however, I threw on some headphones to immerse myself more fully in Mosaic and hoped that the expected sublime majesty would hit me eventually. 

Happily, the revelations started almost immediately and the biggest one was this: casual listening only reveals vibes and melodies, but the true beauty of this album lies far more in how it sounds (and how it flows) than it does in the actual chords and melodies being played. For example, listening to album highlight “Love and the Framed Insects” feels akin to gazing up at the passing clouds while floating on my back in the warm waters near a tropical beach, but the lapping waves keep submerging my ears to warp the sounds of summer bliss into something hallucinatory, unfamiliar, and sometimes otherworldly.

In keeping with that theme of unpredictability and disorientation, Fennesz notes that he experimented a bit with unusual time signatures and gives the 7/4 time of the aforementioned “Love and the Framed Insects” as one example. Uncannily, my other favorite piece (“Goniorizon”) is given as the other example, as it began life as “six hard rock guitar riffs mixed on top of one another.” While neither of those features was even remotely apparent to me when I listened to Mosaic, their effect was definitely felt and they are representative of a very fluid approach to composition that pervades the entire album: everything feels as slippery, elusive, and indistinct as a memory and pieces continually transform like tendrils of smoke rather than resembling rigid compositions with distinct sections in a specific order. 

For example, “Love and the Framed Insects” is essentially just a single simple chord progression, but the chords feel alive and kinetic and texturally resemble liquid glass continually morphing into new shapes like a mirage in a heat haze. Similarly, the chord progression in “Goniorizon” feels crystalline and undulating in way that suggests that the fabric of reality is sensuously and supernaturally rippling and bulging. Also, the chords feel like they have an endlessly shifting balance between ghostliness and physical form that feels like a beach scene witnessed through a lens that languorously drifts in and out of focus.

While I do have my favorites, Mosaic‘s remaining four pieces are each similarly compelling and unusual. For example, in the opener “Heliconia” (named after a plant informally known as the False Bird of Paradise), an epic-sounding surge of heavenly chords steadily builds in intensity before falling away to reveal a tender outro of warbly clean guitar. Elsewhere, “Personare” feels like a beatless dub techno piece time-stretched into spacey abstraction while being slowly sucked into a black hole (and the final thirty seconds are like a beautiful butterfly emerging from its space chrysalis). 

The following “A Man Outside,” on the other hand, evokes the inside of a concrete parking garage in a rainstorm until the appearance of a gorgeously smeared and hallucinatory melodic figure transforms everything, while “Patterning Heart” has the washed-out and bleary unreality of a beautiful landscape viewed with the sun shining directly in your eyes. As impressive as some of the individual songs are, however, I was more beguiled by Fennesz’s vision as a whole and how it seems tapped into the same zeitgeist as recent durational works by artists like Sarah Davachi and Kali Malone. 

While those two artists are pulled in a more ancient and timeless direction, Fennesz has himself found a more condensed and futuristic way to achieve a similar objective: drawing listeners’ focus away from the obvious pleasures of melodies and harmonies and towards the mesmerizing (but more hidden) pleasures of how beautifully sounds can fray, dissolve, linger, transform, and move through space when the right person makes those details a priority.

Listen here.

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Fennesz, “Agora” (Touch, 2019)

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It has been roughly five years since Christian Fennesz last surfaced with a proper solo album (2014’s excellent Bécs), though he has certainly kept busy with other projects in the meantime. For this latest release, however, he found himself in unusual straits, as he lost his studio space and had to move all of his gear into his bedroom. In theory, that was not an optimal work environment and he never ended up setting up much of his usual arsenal, but new constraints can often lead to unexpected breakthroughs. That is arguably the case here: while Agora is not quite an Endless Summer-caliber bombshell or a groundbreaking reinvention of Fennesz’s aesthetic, it is definitely a modest masterpiece of sorts, as quietly recording in his room with minimal gear and omnipresent headphones paved the way for a quartet of truly lovely, nuanced, and absorbing soundscapes.

I wish there was a way to say this that does not sound like an ambiguously back-handed compliment, but it feels like Fennesz devoted an unusual amount of time and focused attention to this album. On previous masterpieces like Endless Summer and Venice, he had a strong, coherent vision and shaped variations upon each theme into an immersive and thoughtfully sequenced arc. Needless to say, that approach worked extremely well, so there was no real need to change it anytime soon, yet Agora takes quite a different shape than its illustrious predecessors. 

In fact, it almost feels like four self-contained mini-EPs: they certainly all feel like they belong together and complement one another beautifully, but each seems like it could have easily been the kernel of its own distinct album instead. While I suspect at least three of those hypothetical albums would have been absolutely wonderful, I do not have any nagging sense of missed opportunity with Agora, as each of these pieces (all clocking in just over ten minutes) feels like a perfect distillation rather than a tantalizing glimpse that begs to be expanded upon. In particular, the album’s two bookends stand as particularly striking examples of Agora‘s divergent stylistic threads. Of those two poles, it is the aptly titled opener (“In My Room”) that best represents the beating heart at the core of the larger song suite.

There is almost an actual beating heart in the piece as well, as a subterranean throb slowly pulses beneath its warmly hissing and undulating reverie of dense, buzzing drones. While those slow-moving sustained tones are certainly the raw material, it would be a stretch to call “In My Room” a drone piece, as it feels more like a landscape of gently shifting tectonic plates bathed in the light of an ascending sunrise: subtly amassing streaks of warmth and color quietly start to eclipse the underlying drones as the piece inexorably moves towards a gorgeous crescendo. 

The two pieces that follow stick to roughly the same aesthetic of quietly lovely ambient drone that ultimately blossoms into something more structured and powerful, though “Agora” does not pull off that feat quite as well as its neighbors (primarily because it starts from a colder, more formless place). The title piece is still quite likable in its own right though, as its floating, slow-moving clouds of blurred and hiss-soaked chords are blissfully meditative—it just has the misfortune of being surrounded by three slow-burning epics of focused intensity.

In “Rainfall,” for example, Fennesz revisits the languorous drones of “In My Room” with unexpectedly vivid and visceral heft, launching an oft-brilliant and churning assault of shuddering, sizzling chords and cascading, overlapping motifs. It is essentially classic Fennesz writ large and it is absolutely wonderful. The closing “We Trigger the Sun,” on the other hand, is almost entirely unrecognizable as a Fennesz piece at first, resembling the sort of deep space ’70s synth music that would be perfectly at home in a cinematic mindfuck like Mandy. Gradually, however, the heavy cosmic vibes dissolve a bit to make room for more traditional Fennesz-esque touches like washes of hazy guitar chords. It is quite a wonderful convergence of unlikely threads, resembling something like a blurred, stretched, and deconstructed Popul Vuh without sacrificing any of the grandeur.

While I sincerely doubt anyone needs to be reminded of it, Agora beautifully reaffirms why Christian Fennesz remains one of the most vital and compelling figures in experimental music: his more challenging impulses and his formidable production genius are always grounded in a strong melodic sensibility. In an abstract way, he is a legitimately fine songwriter, despite the conspicuous lack of anything resembling conventional structures, hooks, melodies, or vocals (though the latter does exist in obscured form on a pair of pieces). As such, Agora would probably be an enjoyable album even if Fennesz were not a textural sorcerer and arch-deconstructionist. 

Happily, however, he is both of those things and he makes full use of those powers to transform the tender, fragile beauty of his central motifs into dazzling vistas of ragged, sizzling, and artfully corroded heaven . It is certainly fair to say that Agora continues Fennesz’s lengthy hot streak and is yet another great album from a master, but that actually undersells the true scope of his achievements a bit. Fennesz has not just made a string of excellent solo albums—he has managed to do so while continually reinventing himself and making each fresh release feel like a legitimate event that opens up fresh territory for others to explore in its wake.

Samples can be found here.

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Fennesz, “Bécs” (Editions Mego, 2014)

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For reasons that are not immediately apparent to me, Bécs is being billed as the conceptual follow-up to 2001’s landmark Endless Summer. To me, it just sounds like another characteristically likable Fennesz album with a couple of better-than-usual pieces, though it is certainly much brighter in tone than either Venice or Black Sea. In any case, this is a fine (and welcome) return by one of experimental music’s most distinctive voices, but it is not any kind of seismic event. It is very hard to be revolutionary more than once, I guess.

If there is a nod to the sun-dappled radiance of Endless Summer, it comes with the opening “Static Kings,” which offers up a lazy melody and some strummed acoustic guitars, though they are warped and churned fairly aggressively by Christian’s laptoppery. Unexpectedly, however, “Static” also features a bold new innovation: an actual band—of sorts, anyway, as Fennesz is joined by bassist Werner Dafeldecker and drummer Martin Brandlmayr. Their contributions are fairly subtle and last only for the one song, but Christian is uncharacteristically joined by other musicians twice more before the album runs its course.

He is solo again for the second piece, “The Liar,” which brutally erases all traces of any kind of summery vibe. Consisting primarily of gnarled, buzzing swells that gradually grow in power below an obscured haze of melody, “The Liar” instantly makes itself known as one of Bécs‘ clear highlights. The other clear highlight follows immediately after in the album’s 10-minute centerpiece “Liminality,” which balances melancholy drones with a surprisingly simple, beautiful, and unprocessed guitar melody. The playing and the melody are themselves straightforward, yet the production is decidedly not, as Christian works some very impressive magic with texture, attack, and dynamics. The overall effect gradually becomes that of a lovely guitar motif struggling in vain to be heard though an escalating squall of static. It is not quite a perfect piece, but it is intermittently damn close, falling just shy of being a masterpiece.

After that, however, Christian’s inspiration seems to wane a bit, as the remaining four pieces do not quite offer anything new, just more variations on the established themes or single ideas explored without significant development. “Palles Athene,” for example, is a lengthy bit of brooding, spacey ambient that just drifts along ominously for six minutes, while the title piece evolves from jarring, quavering single notes into yet another roaring torrent of static that conceals a poignant melody. It is admittedly almost as great as “Liminality,” but its impact is dulled a bit by the fact that Christian has already pulled this particular rabbit from his hat once before.

Bécs winds down with “Sav,” a grainy, rattling, and crackling soundscape duet with guest Cédric Stevens on modular synth, and the brief “Paroles,” a pleasant acoustic guitar-driven reprise of “Static Kings.” Both pieces are likable in their own ways, but neither quite catches fire, though I do like the sputtering and unpredictable electronics that gradually invade “Paroles.” The vibrant textures that Fennesz and Stevens lay down for “Sav” are very impressive too, but the melodic component seems to have been little more than an afterthought, so the promising foundation remains only that.

All of that basically adds up to yet another solid, enjoyable Fennesz album. It may even be a great album, but it is impossible for me to tell without completely fresh ears, as I have been listening to Christian Fennesz for 15 years now and I am too desensitized to his aesthetic to be appropriately dazzled anymore. For the uninitiated, however, Bécs is probably an excellent place to start (as is Endless Summer, of course). As for those who are already converted, Bécs will not disappoint. It probably will not rekindle an intense passion either, but it certainly adds at least a few more gems to Christian’s already-teetering heap.

Listen here.