Fennesz

Fennesz – "Endless Summer"

(from the LP "Endless Summer", 2001)

In 1991, Pearl Jam released their debut single, "Alive", with a video that cut between footage of the band's live shows and shots of a stormy sea. It was black and white, no shading, no half measures, just pure energy, a wave of joy and youth that promised to sweep the globe starting from Seattle. Ten years pass, and the world's hunger for pleasure hasn't faded, but joy is no longer an overwhelming wave. At the dawn of the new millennium, happiness has to be sought in nuance. As if to counterbalance the immediacy brought about by the hypertrophy of new communication technologies, it becomes necessary to multiply opacity, to layer thick strata over things, to turn the world into a haze in order to inhabit it.

From this point of view, "Endless Summer", the album Christian Fennesz released in 2001, absorbs and releases the emotional tones of the turn of the millennium as well as anything could. The epicenter shifts from Seattle to Austria, from a rainy, crackling city to the heart of Mitteleuropa, with its centuries-old weight of fiery passions bound up in lace, ribbons, corsets, ruffles. What sets off from here is no tidal wave: Fennesz's sea is calm, barely rippled, almost still. It's not made for surfing, unlike the sea of Brian Wilson, an artist idolized by the Austrian musician, who in 1999 dedicated to him a disorienting reworking of the classic "Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)". It's instead a sea that cradles things and lets them surface, as seen on the cover of "Venice" (2004), or even frozen, receding to reveal dark earth, as on the cover of "Black Sea" (2008). It's a postcard-perfect sea on the 2007 reissue of "Endless Summer", veiled in the sepia light of a sunset made up entirely of shades, with no contrasts.

This last record, then, marks the pace of a new era in which everyone has to build their own haze in which to take care of themselves. Here Fennesz moves away from glitch practices: the capturing of error that turns chance into poetry from now on gives way to the production of sound from scratch; indeed, the electric guitar, alienated through laptops and various gadgets, will increasingly take center stage in his music. It's also because of this interplay between acoustic and electronic elements that this album perfectly nails the balancing point of a process: from the guitars of the Nineties to the PCs and knobs of the new millennium; and, as a consequence, from the elbow-to-elbow sofa (the iconic one of the Cranberries comes to mind) to bubbles to be shared from a distance.

Fennesz's music will never quite be ambient: ambient settles over things without appearing to be a thing itself. Fennesz's sound, on the other hand, is concrete, at times harsh, at times extremely delicate, but it's always a supplement, something extra: it doesn't cover the environment, it produces a world. Amid blasts of drone and delicate passages that brush against silence, what's being assembled is an alcove: as in the closing image of Melancholia by Lars Von Trier, joy, from now on, doesn't mean sweeping everything away, but not being swept away by imminent disaster.

Set within this record, still sheltered like a pearl in its shell, is the title track, "Endless Summer". The summer that never ends is, in fact, a summer drawing to a close: the track's eight and a half minutes are a farewell to summer, meant to prolong it indefinitely, a goodbye to the sea meant to carry away a bit of warmth and make the coming season beautiful. But has this summer, whose passing fills us with melancholy, ever really existed? Setting aside the old refrain - confirmed by the climate crisis too - that there are no more real seasons anymore, one would say no, this summer we miss never actually existed. Rather, what we're bidding farewell to is the summer of myth, a season that never began and therefore never ends. Indeed "Endless Summer", the album's second track, is built entirely on the true topos of contemporary music, perhaps even its cliché: the loop, a circle with neither beginning nor end. Marking the eternal recursion of this track are two electric guitar chords, F major seventh and C major with an added ninth, which turn placidly, at a tempo that's neither slow nor fast, an "andante moderato", one might say. The guitar tone is clear, crystalline, glinting like ripples on the sea at sunset. The riff repeats without pause, in a 4/4 that is likewise regular and round. At times it disappears, sinking into clumps of electronic crackle, underwater gurgles; at times the currents carry the echo of another, far-off melody, the memory of another summer. But then the loop resurfaces, dragging along all the encrustations of its immersion. It keeps repeating, less clear and crystalline, but it keeps repeating.

There's no crescendo in this track, nor is there, as happens in the greatest poet of the loop, William Basinski, a wearing-away, a repetition that disintegrates. There's only the story of this endurance, of this endless repeating. It brings to mind a track wildly different in style and technique, but similar in emotional tone: "Pictures Of You" by The Cure, where we found photographs that, the more you looked at them, didn't wear away but came alive. It's gorgeous and heartrending.

We're asking ourselves what to do with our melancholy, whether we shouldn't simply reject it as a sad passion. But then, exactly halfway through the track, at the four-minute mark, something happens. Our loop, which by now we might call, in an old-fashioned term, "substance", surfaces completely with a leap and a puff, stays right at the water's surface, and keeps wrapping itself in its own refining. It keeps transforming, modulating into ever-different frequencies, but now it's no longer hidden, it's exposed in all its nuances. It's here, fully and absolutely here. And we can immerse ourselves, we can wrap ourselves in it, like Ulysses's companions letting ourselves go to a monstrous sound, letting ourselves be torn apart, letting ourselves dissolve. For 4 minutes we are inside the thing, inside the substance, inside its fullness as it wraps around itself to perfect itself, we are inside the absolute.

"Endless Summer" is a wonderful song because it's deeply moving, but also and above all because it's a shelter from emotions. On one hand, the melancholy it expresses isn't softness but, on the contrary, irregularity, non-conformity with the world, an inexhaustible capacity for transformation. On the other hand, and above all, this track isn't a gentle cradling in our own emotions, it isn't the pop mirror of our daily lives. It's a leap - lasting 8 minutes but leaving lasting traces - into a non-human dimension, an alienating, monstrous dimension. Rather than the pathos of wonder, Fennesz gives us estrangement: perhaps it's our most intense way of being in the world, when, just like Justine in Melancholia, we don't know where we are, but it's in this not-knowing that we put down roots.

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29/04/2026