Electric music – you should flow

There is a lot of water on the covers of the albums of the Viennese guitar oceanician Christian Fennesz. But the water symbolizes neither idyll nor wildness, but abstract and is still part of the culturalized world. For example, you can also see a boat or shimmer. But the music is a sea: Ambient only played with the guitar and probably 28 filters and modulators. It goes up and down and wants to keep the listener down again and again without sedating them. This is a balancing act. The ridge, which separates the music of Fennesz of pleasant ambient, is narrow, but still immovable. Fennesz always succeeds in hike on this ridge.

In the beginning was his music, on the EP “Instrument” and on the albums “Hotel Paral.lel” (1997) and “Plus Forty Seven Degrees 56 ’37” Minus Sixteen Degrees 51′ 08 “(2000) and also a little industrial. Sound, which he still modifies.

Fennesz has succeeded again on his new album »Mosaic«, the first in five years. It still waves and flows and looks so raw and filled with productive coincidences and glitches that stupid is not able to adjust. Otherwise, most of the ambient wants that the surroundings can be imagined as light and simple and temporarily non-existent. The six five to nine-minute pieces on »Mosaic« but nothing negate. They aim directly at the listeners who look at the surrounding world and do not hide behind a wallpaper. If you hear this here, you should not be stimulated in your illusion, but move, you could also say: to flow.

And precisely because there is no favor here, you always hear the work on and with the material. In the play “Heliconia” it suddenly hit a guitar chord into the areas. In “Love and the Framed Insects”, the sound disappears briefly into a noise noise and then put together again. “A Man Outside” booms undergrowered. Everything is built in such a way that you can get lost without being stupid. Ambient that does not prevent aesthetic experiences, but only works if you get into the opposite and more complicated layers from which this flow is composed here.

In the “men’s fantasies”, Klaus Theweleit takes away the beautiful thoughts that Pablo Neruda’s poems – that has been successful – successful thinking, successful connections between people, ability to love – has to do with fluid and liquefied, i.e. with resolutions. In any case, this thought finds a musical equivalent in the sound art of Fennesz.

Fennesz: »Mosaic« (Touch)