Fennesz "Venice" (Touch)
By Brian Moore
Monday. Jul 26, 12:03 PM
Impressionistic, rhythmic beauty and emotion that come from the music’s detachedness and digitized process.

Christian Fennesz is a Vienna-based electronic soundscape artist who uses highly treated guitar sounds and frequencies to build multi-layered walls of crystallized sound. He draws upon the archetype of Kevin Shields/My Bloody Valentine but mixes up his own unique blend of processed guitars for a compelling and genre-pushing formula.

A former member of Austrian underground experimental rock group Maische, Fennesz released his electronic debut, Hotel Paral.lel, in 1997. Three years later he returned with Plus Forty-Seven Degrees 56' 37" Minus Sixteen Degrees 51' 08" and Music For an Isolation Tank. His name and signature sound quickly drew attention in electronic and avant-garde circles with the release of Endless Summer in 2000, an album that diffuses the melodiousness of The Beach Boys with waves of electronic and digital sounds. With the release of Venice, Fennesz continues his exploration of the textural and sonic possibilities via processed guitar, synth, and thin electronic percussion.

The opening tracks “Rivers of Sand” and “City of Light” ebb and flow in digital waves over subtle melodies, light touches of samples, and sparse percussion. “Circassian” follows as the first real attention-grabbing track with its reverb-soaked MBV-like guitar(s), building and shifting among sustained synth tones and ambient flourishes. Here Fennesz shows a gravity and depth that effectively breaks the listener out of a hypnotic state and into a supraliminal bliss. The highlight of the album arrives with the only vocal-based track entitled “Transit.” Singer/songwriter David Sylvian provides icy vocals and haunting lyrics over soft explosions of squelched guitar feedback. As Sylvian sings: “Say goodbye to Europe. Our shared history dies with Europe,” images of a sinking Venice and all of its history come to the fore. The lyrics echo a Europe stuck between its history and the ever-widening global village, or someone on the edge of saying goodbye to the old and unsure of how to welcome the new. “The Stone of Impermanence” provides a surprisingly punctuated ending with a highly distorted guitar strumming defiantly into nothing as the groundwork dissipates underneath it.

Analogous to centuries of erosion and deterioration of Venice’s man-made foundations in the Adriatic Sea, Venice conveys the notion of renewal and decay that connects the ever-thinning line between Old Europe and New Europe. Each track on this album evokes the passage of time as bursts of sound rise and fall into a nebulous wash. Sheets of synthesized guitar signals are squeezed, compressed, and inverted to create pulsing electric fields replete with peaking digital glitches. Unlike most electronic artists, Fennesz likes to miniaturize his sounds and then stack them on top of each other to create a vast fabric of interweaving melodies and mood shifts. As a result, the music is more impressionistic than expressionistic in that Fennesz paints his canvasses with many small brushes and uses one large brush to unify the compositions. Nevertheless, there is rhythmic beauty and emotion that comes from the music’s detachedness and digitized process. Though seemingly difficult to listen to in the traditional (passive) sense, the music requires a different mode of listening. None of these tracks are hummable as they’re void of any definite matrix or structure. As quickly as you remember them, they’re gone - eroded from memory.
www.fennesz.com
www.touchmusic.org.uk

Brian Moore

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