Fennesz - Endless Summer
(Mego)
It caught me off guard at first, this, the third LP of Austrian laptop guitarist Christian Fennesz. This is the last place one familiar with his music would expect to find a catchy refrain, or any reference to pop sensibilities at all. Its not that he hasn't alluded to this in previous efforts, his 1999 7"/CD single FENNESZ PLAYS, featuring covers of the Rolling Stones "Paint it Black" and the Beach Boys "Put Your Head on My Shoulder" was just that, an allusion; more of an electronic residue of the originals, rather than covers.
His first LP in 1997, Hotel Para.lel, was a perfect synthesis of blown out guitar noise and dance floor rage. His last LP, +47 Degrees 56' 37" -16 Degrees 51' 08, released on the UK's Touch, fit appropriately into their mostly esoteric roster. An exploration and fetishizing of the sounds in his garden, it had little to do with melody. If anything, Endless Summer finds Fennesz picking up where FENNESZ PLAYS left off. Songs are constructed around the melody, rather than it being a small part in the whole. The title track is an amazing amalgam of micro sounds and macro guitar, a patchwork of familiar and unknown, coherent and disorientating. The last couple of minutes feature an acoustic guitar that stutters and spits-up, struggling to find its center, rolling around in a lush refrain of synthesized stings. Caught off guard I'm sure.
A few tracks later we find "Shisheido," by far the most traditional of Fennesz's compositions, utilizing pop's basic recipe: two guitars. On one hand, a simple chord melody bathed in an acid bath of glitches and pops, and on the other a plucked out lead of longing, contemplation and the sorrows of the end of a California summer. A sentiment echoed on the album's artwork of chilly sunbathers, red orange skies, and loan boats on the horizon with dark clouds overhead. In the stand out track, "Before I Leave," he finds a way to suspend time and catch a single moment in between the notes--the work of Steve Reich or Morton Feldman put on pause and investigated completely. We're left with "Happy Audio," a comforting refrain of little notes that over the course of ten plus minutes has its insides turned out. In a world of Clicks and Cuts, a definite breath of fresh air.
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