Fennesz - Endless Summer

A common criticism to the music that may not appear blatantly song-oriented sounds like: "That's not music, that's just noise". Such a simple dichotomy serves to arbitrarily divide everything to palatable and unpalatable collection of sounds. I think it's a shame, because there's a whole big universe between listenability and unlistenability, accessibility and inaccessibility. Moreover, noise can be musical as well. Anyone can take a laptop, a fancy FX-processor, maybe an instrument (most likely guitar or synthesizer) and make weird sounds with it all. It takes a real compositional talent to organize sounds in a manner that sounds musical and has purpose or direction. Laptop musician Christian Fennesz certainly excels at making melodic compositions out of tricky sound manipulations and various odd micro-glitches. Melodic elements you'd otherwise expect to be on display in conventional song structures appear buried in the warbly, gurgling and buzzing sand. The eight minute title track is clearly a guitar based composition, yet the guitars in this song are mangled, downsampled, altered past the usual recognition. Likewise, "Before I Leave" uses micro-sound sampling and editing techniques to create a chord progression of usually seventh-chords. Fennesz even offers his own twist on the kind of music that already suspended with traditional songwriting approach: "Happy Audio" is a gradually evolving, buzzing, hypnotic 11 minute piece that sounds like a microsound take on Kraut-rock a la Neu! or Harmonia.

What makes this record so oddly compelling is that despite the abrasive frontier, the undercurrent is made up of warm and inviting harmonies, that evoke summer-like moods. As such, "Endless Summer" serves as an excellent treatise on contrast and contradictory juxtaposition between the harsh exterior and the beautiful interior.