Fennesz - The Black Sea

Austrian electronic musician Fennesz is arguably one of the most famous glitch-tronic artists, who has, combining guitars with laptop, created compositions where one can discern melodic beauty under the layers of clicks and cuts and white noise. It is the re-contextualization of melody under the digitally manipulated noise that made Endless Summer (2001) as one of the undisputed classics of the decade. This opus sounded like a pop album for the experimental electronica crowd. Even though the new album still features guitar as an easily recognizable element, The Black Sea is more ambient in nature. The pieces are longer, three of them over eight minutes. They, particularly the ten-minute title track, seem almost classical in construction. The album closer "Saffron Revolution" sounds quite transcendent. Not exactly the best Fennesz album, but nonetheless Fennesz has flair in his field.

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.