Fennesz - The Sunset of Dysfunction

Premise: The Aesthetics of Dysfunction

What can be defined as the post-noise revolution is characterized by the birth of a genuine aesthetic in the application and treatment of the noise element in electronic music: from the overbearing, almost cacophonous overflow of this element in so-called harsh noise, it changes shape, inheriting the Eno-esque character of environmental symbiosis and applying it, not between music and concept, but within the music itself — shifting from absolute protagonist and undisputed linchpin to an elegant, lavish embellishment of cyclical structures devoted instead to the minimalist current. The resulting genre takes the name glitch, a term from electronic language referring to a certain type of sound emitted by a working device, caused by an unforeseen error. This term ties back to one of the main sources generating the noise: it is in fact deliberately caused by erroneous use of production software, interventions aimed at “dirtying” rather than improving sound quality, sometimes even going as far as destroying the equipment being used.

It is likewise a form of conceptual music, both in its conception and in its execution: cleaning with dirt, working to modulate sound frequencies stemming from malfunctions, reconsidering these malfunctions in a different light — namely as a different way of exploiting the medium, rather than exploiting it incorrectly. A research with a hidden purpose: to try to conceive of what is considered the erroneous side of a production tool simply as its hidden side, incomprehensible when generated randomly but equally significant when deliberately sought.

This is the founding concept of glitch music, whose manifesto can undoubtedly be considered the album “Wohnton” by the German group Oval; this is the basis of its aesthetic, which would then develop into creating, with these very elements, something elegant and lush. It is within this field that Christian Fennesz's sonic research moves, as he, after helping to bring glitch to life and becoming one of its standard-bearers, continued his journey toward a progressive abandonment of the noise aesthetic, culminating, in more recent times, in a reunion between his own output and one of its main sources of inspiration, namely ambient music.

Capitolo 1: The dark side of the guitar

Unlike most of his colleagues, contemporaries and predecessors, Austrian Christian Fennesz is, first and foremost, a musician and artist with classical training: from the age of eight he studied at the conservatory, graduating on what would become his instrument, the guitar. On top of that, his personal background also includes time spent at the Academy of Fine Arts. His earliest musical experiences were, in truth, almost all in live performance, supporting other musicians: the first to cross his path was the duo Peter Rehberg-Jim O'Rourke, respectively one of the most active experimenters of the Austrian underground scene (who would “ferry” him to the Mego label, which he owned) and a genuine guru of the American underground. With them, Fennesz would then form a trio, Fenn O'Berg, dedicated to blending their styles into an avant-garde pastiche of improvised electronics, discussed in the final paragraph. This intense activity would lead him to produce, alongside his own work, a myriad of albums in collaboration with some of the leading figures of the current and past music scene.

But Fennesz, as already mentioned, is first and foremost a guitarist. Or rather, the most atypical of guitarists. From what can be considered the instrument of excellence in the rock field, the Austrian extracts its darkest, most hidden soul, equipping himself for this operation with entirely digital instrumentation, made up of samplers, processors, sound production software: all stored and compacted comfortably within his laptop. Listening to his work, especially from the early part of his career, it's almost impossible to recognize sounds that even remotely resemble a guitar: that's precisely the point — to extract and put forward a new vision of an instrument whose most radical extension previously received was its application within noise, with its related methods (for instance, Kim Gordon's “walks”).

Fennesz made his debut on the scene with the 1995 EP Instrument, released in a limited edition and in vinyl-only format. Still far from settling definitively into a single style, the experiments on this brief work mostly show the Austrian's varied sources of inspiration: the ambient-techno of Aphex Twin and Autechre on the opening “1”, the noise elements over drum'n'bass rhythms à-la-808 State on “2”, and again Aphex Twin, this time the acid one, on “3”. The closing “4”, meanwhile, is a simultaneous nod to the gurus of ambient music, the more “concrete” Brian Eno first and foremost (the one of “On Land”) and to highbrow avant-garde (a Stockhausen-like sample cyclically invades and “violates” the mystical sonic backdrop).

Two years pass before his first full-length work arrives: Hotel Paral.lel is a landmark album for the coining, spread and development of glitch. A cramped, hard-to-digest work right from its titles (where the almost total use of the German language contributes significantly to the impression of a "harsh" record), it's the application to electronics of what, years earlier, Russolo had imported into art music.

The opening of "Sz" is a tear through Alva Noto: similarly basic sound waves are destroyed with a barrage of distortion and processing. "Nebenraum" instead offers a kosmische drone as its model, over which a sprout of sonic dysfunction occasionally spills with reduced force. Then come "Blok M", close to an Lfo piece processed until it becomes pure contortion of waves, the tribal gurgles of "Santora", the dark-ambient watercolor of "Dheli Plaza" and the apex of Fenneszian guitar-processing, namely "Fa", perhaps the only musically "conventional" track on the entire record and a forewarning of the sounds that will define the second half of the Austrian's career.

After a funeral chant for electronic devices ("Traxdata"), in its second half the album settles into more contemplative and ambient sounds, which also influence the Fennesz style of the near future: the brief "GR-500", "Uds", "Aus" (a genuine possible outtake of the future Endless Summer) and "5" fall into this category, indebted to a wealth of new sounds pouring directly from the Austrian's guitar, with the crucial involvement of his laptop and its induced malfunctions. In between these watercolors there's room for two tracks of pure noise: white and rhythmic in "Sazoo", pink and the sole protagonist in "Super Feedbacker", a chronicle of a Midi system malfunction.

A foundational piece in formalizing ideas previously originated by various artists, Mego and otherwise (Oval, General Magic and Farmers Manual above all), Hotel Paral.lel, while not exactly the manifesto of glitch as a genre nor its progenitor, can be considered one of the finest works of the entire movement, as well as the first to compact the insights of those who had already given rise to the genre beforehand without yet applying what would become its characteristic aesthetic.

Between 1997 and '99 two EPs see the light of day, the untraceable Il Libro Mio and Fennesz Plays (on which he has fun violating two cornerstones of the Rolling Stones and the Beach Boys), along with an album containing compositions used in an audio-visual installation by the German artist and musician Georg Huber, known as Zeitlom, titled Music For An Isolation Tank. It's a collection of collages much closer in musical form to field recordings than to the noisy glitch outlook, with occasional ambient flashes sketching complex, intricate sonic architectures, composed and performed with "natural"-sourced samples. Worth noting, though, is the probably indissoluble bond between the music and the visual expression, where it was without doubt the latter that was meant to frame the former.

Chapter 2: Conceptual abstraction

In 1999 comes the Austrian's second work instead. His first album released on Touch, not a record label but a genuine association devoted to promoting modernity across the most varied art forms (photography, visual art, multimedia, music), Plus Forty Seven Degrees 56′ 37″ Minus Sixteen Degrees 51′ 08″ also marks a temporary marriage with noise in its purest state. The influence of the little-known work with Huber is extremely strong: recorded in a garden set up like a studio, the album is a first approach to the world of pure field recordings as well as the most substantial extremization of glitch.

A subtractive process comparable to the one that drove the early invectives of Ryoji Ikeda is now applied to Fennesz's music, and this translates into the near-total disappearance of the ambient element and the forceful, dominant establishment of muffled, noisy samples, processed to exhaustion, to the point of becoming even more central than the Austrian's guitar.

It's nature that surpasses music, the abstract that goes beyond the concrete, imagination beyond taste: this is how paintings are born that portray nature through each listener's own subjective lens, like "010"; updates on the insights of the Eno-Byrne duo in "013"; the abyssal expanses of "014", the album's masterpiece, where one seems to stand before an immense waterfall or in the depths of an endless sea; nods to an almost-past (the glitch one) and to a future yet to come in the closing "018"; but also pure noise samples, like the wind-and-rain storm of "016", or the light crystalline breeze of "012", which serves as a preamble to a catharsis that arrives halfway through the track.

Far from everything and everyone, from all logic and rationality, Plus Forty Seven Degrees 56′ 37″ Minus Sixteen Degrees 51′ 08″ is Fennesz's most experimental and daring album, the most surprising but also the most "difficult": situated in a metaphysical dimension, with no possibility of resembling anything or anyone, it perhaps only pays the price of its own being "beyond everything", that is, a complexity so extreme it leads to isolation.

Overall, the album proves incomparable both to the Austrian's debut and to the works that will follow; it is without doubt the highest peak of Fennesz's conceptual research, if not of his musical one.

The 15 minutes of the Live At Revolver EP revisit much of the sound of Hotel Paral.lel, with only a few nods to the second album limited to the use of numerous samples. Once again it's the guitar that is the undisputed protagonist of this mini-concert, almost foreshadowing the turn taken by Endless Summer.

Two more collaborative albums mark 2000: the first is a live EP with Rosy Parlane, one of the many standout talents unearthed by Touch, a New Zealand audio-visual artist mainly linked to the ambient-dub school of Biosphere and the dark ripples of BJNilsen, the discoverer of the middle ground between ambient and industrial.

The EP, no longer available today, collects two tracks from a live performance by the pair, which add little to either artist's career: Parlane's cold, desolate ambient backdrops, over which Fennesz moves forward with glitch elements and the use of processed guitar.

The second work, titled Afternoon Tea, brings together five of the most influential artists ever to grace the experimental scene: alongside the Austrian, the collaborators include another underground mainstay in Oren Ambarchi, the Australian experimentalist and Alva Noto "disciple" Pimmon, the "usual" Peter Rehberg, and a true sacred monster of free improvisation like Keith Rowe. A lineup with all the potential needed to produce a landmark of the genre: two great prospects, two artists established through their own innovations, and a guru who has made innovation itself his life's work.

But the result of the collaboration is actually rather disappointing, at least relative to expectations: the five divide up the work almost too neatly, with Rowe lightly plucking his guitar in the sonic void of the opening "Afternoon Tea 1", Pimmon on laptop amid the dirty minimal drones of "Afternoon Tea 2", Ambarchi and his glacial soundscapes taking centre stage on "No Title", Rehberg pushing into (admittedly rather borderline) ambient-noise territory on "Live Tea 1", and Fennesz closing things out, fittingly, with the genuinely excellent "Live Tea 2", yet another bridge between the glitch rides of Hotel Paral.lel and the droning expanses of his later work.

The individual performances are certainly not lacking; what's missing, and what one would have hoped for from this album, is a real meeting of the five musicians' minds and styles, which never actually happens: perhaps only Fennesz and Ambarchi trade a few ideas within their respective pieces, but nothing that even comes close to a genuinely shared performance. Afternoon Tea ends up being little more than a simple collection of five unreleased tracks by their respective authors, squandering the chance to create a lasting electronic treatise in favour of a convenient carving-up of space.

Chapter 3: The Aesthetic-Musical Revolution

Fennesz's third album, Endless Summer, is a genuine revolution. A revolution in his career and in the history of electronic music. Having left behind his experiences with the original strain of glitch, which he himself had helped no small amount to coin, Fennesz turns a new page. What was once the end, the purpose (aesthetics), becomes the means, the tool. In its place, the new purpose is simply that of any musician outside conceptual avant-garde: making music. In both the theoretical and practical sense of the term. No longer the pursuit of a conceptual aesthetic through a union of music and anti-music, nor the formula of ontological parity between error and sound production with the attainment of that aesthetic as its substantial element; rather, music as substance, and everything else (instruments, software, errors, malfunctions, noise, melody, rhythm) as defining elements, mere accidents of that very substance. In short: the ascension and transformation of a purely avant-garde phenomenon into a pop statement, sealed by the reference to the man Fennesz would later declare one of his chief inspirations: Brian Wilson.

The opening "Made In Hong Kong" already signals the Austrian's new sonic dimension: an intermittent cascade of melodic guitar chords, "disturbed" in the typical Fennesz-processing manner, and so still, despite everything, rooted in a glitch matrix. But it's with the title track that Fennesz fully lays his revolutionary cards on the table: a piece for solo treated guitar, built from countless digital overdubs, each with a different sonic facet; in many of them, moreover, the pure sound of the electric guitar is clearly distinguishable as never before. On "A Year In A Minute" the disturbed glitch coils return, but used once again in an "atmospheric" way, treated so as to function as soundscape rather than main line. Cut from the same cloth are the ancestral architectures of "Got To Move On" and the ten minutes of meticulous cosmic-melodic catharsis of "Happy Audio", while "Caecilia" plays with liquid tempo changes in a moving, touching cybernetic kaleidoscope: it's the first time feeling overtakes concept, another manifesto of the change Fennesz was bringing to his music.

"Shisheido" picks up the style of the title track and is perhaps the finest composition for treated guitar ever recorded, an intimate, melodic piece, once again aiming at emotion rather than concept, while "Before I Live" bows out with a vintage synthetic minimalism entirely free of noise elements. All of it serves as a sort of statement from Fennesz regarding his distancing from the aesthetic of his early work, as well as a nod towards the line of composers headed by Ryuichi Sakamoto, with whom the Austrian would go on to have a fruitful collaboration.

A cornerstone in legitimizing the entire glitch aesthetic, Endless Summer is Fennesz's masterpiece and the undisputed manifesto of an entire generation of experimenters. The number of figures swept up by glitch's endless summer even spills beyond the world of electronic music, as shown by the unexpected metamorphosis of a big name like David Sylvian, who went from the smooth, elegant, new age-flavoured arrangements of "Dead Bees On A Cake" to a pure blend of electroacoustics (complete with a collaboration with Fennesz himself), improvisation and songwriting on "Blemish".

The shockwave sent through the electronic music landscape by Endless Summer was anything but ignored, and Fennesz soon became one of the most sought-after musicians on the Zero scene, collaborating with remarkably different figures, though not always with results on a par with his solo work. The first of these collaborations came in a live performance by the Austrian with Mika Vainio, the more experimental half of Pan Sonic and an influential figure in the development of the electronic scene across various fields (each marked by a different pseudonym), later released on record as Invisible Architechture. The time when even Vainio would feed on the drifts of Fennesz's work had yet to come, and the result of the collaboration between the two is a show steeped in an ambient-noise that belongs more to the Austrian than to the Finn, yet remains distant from both their usual styles, condensed instead into an acidic, jagged ambient music.

The two long sets (a quarter of an hour for the first, half an hour for the second) make for excellent listening for fans, but fail to truly showcase either artist's art at its best. Another opportunity perhaps wasted to merge their respective potentials through collaboration, but given the live context in which it took shape, the record still comes across positively, if only as an interesting digression in both their careers (especially Vainio's).

The same year brought Wrapped Island, the album made in collaboration with Polwechsel, among the leading figures of the "new free improvisation" pioneered by the Necks. The album, however, shows little trace of Fennesz's presence, and seems instead to be essentially a work by the group on its own, with the Austrian musician simply joining the chorus of laptops and virtual instruments without contributing his own style, nor his guitar (there's no trace of it throughout the whole album).

The compilation Field Recordings (2002) brings together a couple of previously unreleased tracks with pieces composed for film soundtracks, audio-visual installations, the best of his collaborations and guest appearances on other artists' albums, plus the entire Instrument EP: an excellent document of the lesser-known side of the Austrian's early career.

Closing out a 2002 defined by collaborations is also Split#15, an EP with Main, by then a vehicle for Robert Hampson alone. The sound of this second incarnation of the former duo (Scott Dawson, originally at the helm with Hampson, left in 1996) hadn't remained untouched by the Fennesz-driven revolution in its isolationist soundscapes, many of them built using guitar-processing, "disturbed" by occasional, muted glitch elements. The EP, however, as had already happened with Light, is a "split" effort (two sides each): Fennesz's compositions are three Endless Summer outtakes (excellent, but overall inferior to any track from the album), while Main's three tracks add nothing new to the band's story. A release that could probably have been skipped, likely put out for a purpose similar to the aforementioned Light.

Two years pass, during which the Austrian collaborates with various artists on album productions (the most notable result being "Blemish" by David Sylvian, featuring their duet "A Fire In The Forest", which stakes a claim as the album's masterpiece), and in 2004 a recording of a forty-minute performance by Fennesz and Keith Rowe, dating back to 2002 and held in Nantes, France, is released on CD under the title Live At The LU.

For the second time the two cross paths, and this time with far better results than on the Afternoon Tea album with the five-piece supergroup. For forty minutes Rowe continuously produces sounds ranging from guitar runs to ethereal drone expanses to frantic samples that periodically shatter the musical unity. All of it, before emerging from the speakers, passes through the laptop manned by Fennesz, who works on the sound with his classic processing techniques, using the guitar as the main line and "dirtying" its sonic unity, blending the pure, ethereal drones with occasional silent interludes, and loosening, narrowing and trimming the samples to better fit the context. All without, however, making any substantial changes to their typical clichés, particularly the Austrian's. Even so, this is a collaboration that this time succeeds, even in blending, however "logically" and sparely, the two musicians' stylistic elements.

Also in 2003 comes another live album, this time by Fennesz alone (the vinyl edition had already been released a year earlier), documenting a concert held in Japan in 2003, titled Live In Japan.

Here too we're dealing with forty unbroken minutes of pure guitar and laptop improvisation, and this time the result is stratospheric. A continuous sonic flow, at times dreamlike, at others noisier: a veritable summa of the paths Fennesz has trodden throughout his career, with nods to the glitch of times past, extreme excursions that almost recall Plus Forty Seven Degrees, and relaxed electro-acoustic openings, where the guitar becomes the undisputed protagonist.

In reality, on close listening it's possible to notice how the latter prevail, even in the most glitch-heavy moments: when it isn't played directly, the guitar is nevertheless always present via sample, and the sonic flow, despite more than one nostalgic nod to the glitch of the early era, still holds steadily to muffled melodic and dreamlike atmospheres, on the same path as Endless Summer.

Live in Japan is the testament of an artist just as effective at reproducing his music live, a manifesto that retraces Fennesz's career and also a final clue (Venice would come out just a few months later) pointing to the Austrian's gradual drift away from glitch-music.

Before the new album, there's room for a new collaboration with Mika Vainio, this time in the company of a true guru of experimental music history: Christian Zanesi, current artistic director of the never-defunct GRM. The unusual trio brings to life a GRM Experience that is a digital, modern interpretation of musique concrète, in which the Austrian offers a taste of the sounds set to resurface in the near future. The basic elements of these are the near-total elimination of pure noise in favor of the treated guitar taking center stage, first carved into an atmospheric undergrowth, then also sketching melodic lines, with the marginal and increasingly muted aid of the odd element of "sonic disturbance". Vainio adds a minimal atmosphere typical of his solo career, audible above all in the rhythmic soundscape of the tracks, all under the watchful eye of Zanesi, whose contribution is greater in production than in performance. The portions of musique concrète join the glitch remnants to form the sonic backdrop against which the Finn's minimal rhythms and the Austrian's guitar-processed expanses intertwine.

Pulled off impeccably, this time also in blending the artistic inclinations of the three participants, GRM Experience serves as an excellent and substantial preview of the next chapter in Fennesz's main career.

Chapter 4: Say our goodbye to glitch

The ongoing evolution that has characterized Fennesz's career continues on his fourth work, titled Venice. His music is no longer aesthetic, nor is it even glitch as it still was up to that point: the absolute and undisputed protagonist is now the guitar, which until then had been merely a means, an instrument on a par with the laptop or the samples. Now it's the latter that adapt, that twist and distort the central element, namely the ancestral openings, at times ambient, slow and deep, "marine", at others more "earthly", multifaceted, disturbed, but with increasingly sensual, understated and simple sonorities, and increasingly less noisy and jagged ones.

The opening "Rivers Of Sand" is already a manifesto of the Austrian's latest new face: an ethereal, dreamlike harmonic expanse of treated-guitar dominates the scene, growing until it implodes. "Chateau Rouge" continues along the same path, a sort of sweet guitar music box surrounded by a landscape that is muffled and compact in its depths, "disturbed" but only on the surface. "City Of Light" accentuates the darker tones while keeping the sonic flow constant and intact, this time struck more by lush noisy rifts: it's the introspective stillness of the night sea contrasting with the pallid lights of the city.

The twenty seconds of distorted layers of "Onsra" open the door to the goosebump-inducing wall of vibrations that is the masterpiece "Circassian": an unstoppably erupting volcano that effectively anticipates the monumental constructions of Tim Hecker's "Ravedeath, 1972". "Onsay" is a brief gem, a solitary drone stretched out in all its most intimate ambitions, while "The Other Face" picks up where "City Of Light" left off. "Transit" is the odd one out, the voice outside the choir. The protagonist here is David Sylvian, who lends his warm, deep voice to a hazy, almost silent electronic base, interspersed with rarefied "concrete" interventions, which bursts forth powerfully during the chorus, enveloping the Englishman's voice, before sinking back down again. It's music bowing to poetry, from two musicians at the height of their creativity, merging with it exceptionally well. It's Fennesz's first "song", a format he would only return to instrumentally ten years later. "The Point Of It All", in turn, proceeds along the same wavelength as "Circassian", while "Laguna" is a piece for pure guitar, for the very first time almost free of treatments, sunny, nostalgic, picturesque. "Asusu", another concrete interlude, breaks the rhythm before the closing "The Stone Of Independence", which closes the circle with a temporary and hardly nostalgic return to the sound of the past, amid tempo changes, noise elements living in deliberately forced coexistence with melody and an underlying claustrophobic tenor.

With his fourth album, Fennesz delivers the album of sonic and emotional maturity, the first true painting after the abstract architectures of his early work and the post-contemporary hyperbole of Endless Summer.

After the second breakthrough of his career, the Austrian composer resumes his by-now habitual run of collaborations, performing live with one of his mentors in drone-ambient evolution, Ryuichi Sakamoto. The result is the EP Sala Santa Cecilia, released in 2005, a year after the performance, containing the brief live set in full across its twenty minutes. The two, working exclusively with laptops, create a crescendo of expansive, ethereal sonic flows, never predictable but not exactly "new" either. Overall, 20 minutes of top-class musicianship, but nothing particularly added to the usual clichés of the two artists.

That same year the Austrian reunites with his friend Oren Ambarchi, the insatiable Keith Rowe and Japanese guru Toshimaru Nakamura for a performance that culminated in the album Cloud, credited to Four Gentlemen Of The Guitar. At last the fusion of styles and artistic paths comes off almost perfectly: Fennesz and Ambarchi converse with their laptops, managing to reshape Nakamura's surges, which are also broken up by Rowe's jagged interjections. The best result comes in the hour-long improvisation titled "Yellow Cloud", in which the two musicians' slow textures and the gurus' guitar parts come together to create a balanced set, even if perhaps a touch short on sparks.

Once again nothing innovative, but a top-tier performance and the thrill, admittedly fairly common in 2000s electronica, of seeing two leading lights of the modern scene duet with two of their own masters.

Barely time to catch a breath before the "usual" Erstwhile brings together a quartet representing the entire contemporary experimental electronic scene: two for the Land of the Rising Sun (Sachiko M and former Ground Zero member Otomo Yoshihide) and two for Austria (our man and the "usual" Pita). Once again a live performance, recorded and released under the title Erstlive 005, with Fennesz this time in the role of guitarist alongside Yoshihide, Sachiko and Pita on laptops. Once again, nothing revolutionary for any of the four, except finally the chance to see the Austrian dealing exclusively with his own instrument: but what truly dominates are the minimal sound waves and the guitar "assaults" of the two Japanese musicians.

Two years pass before Fennesz's path crosses again with Ryuichi Sakamoto's, to compose their first studio album together. Cendre continues in the same style shown on the brief Sala Santa Cecilia, namely a minimalist-rooted ambient-drone music, floating and atmospheric, already partly previewed on Venice. If, however, in the live performance improvisation could make such a style enjoyable, in the duo's studio debut one might reasonably have expected a touch more personality given their respective track records. The result, then, is a good record of expansive atmospheres, though light years away from the peaks the two have reached in their own individual careers.

Chapter 5: Ambient (Re)conciliation

2007 closes out with a digital-download-only release of a track titled "A Desolate Shore A Shadow Passes By", drawn from a studio session that had taken place the previous year. A year later, the piece is split into two parts and released as an EP, Transition.

Fennesz's "maturity", as already discussed, is a pursuit that's far more emotional than conceptual, though by no means a disavowal of his past: the path he follows is one firmly geared towards renewal, a constant search for elements capable of producing new stimuli, a total refusal to stick to a fixed cliché or commit to a single facet for too long. It's a quest always in motion, guaranteeing something new with every release, without ever discarding anything learned along the way. The "new" Fennesz is a painter of ambient, dreamlike and evocative portraits, and above all a guitarist before he's a producer.

Before unleashing his new work, the Austrian still finds time to produce an EP featuring yet another collaboration, following those with Rosy Parlane and Oren Ambarchi, this time with one of Touch's standard-bearers: Philip Jeck, a multifaceted artist active as a choreographer, illusionist, theatre actor, visual artist and author of watercolours poised between drone and psychedelia. Once again, though, the two don't actually cross paths in a true collaboration, nor in the release of unreleased material: Amoroso is in fact a split on which the two each perform a piece by composer Charles Matthews dedicated to the father of sacred minimalism, Arvo Pärt, and situated somewhere around the drone extremism theorised by Phill Niblock.

Fennesz's fifth album comes out in mid-2008, four years after its predecessor, and its title alone, along with hints dropped by the works that preceded it, gives away where the record goes digging. If Venice was the meeting point between land and sea, Black Sea is a total immersion into the deepest abyss. It's the Austrian's full embrace of electroacoustic ambient and sonic stratification. The opening of the title track is eloquent: seagull cries, electronically treated yet still unmistakable, a downpour of rain, thunder, lightning, and suddenly, the warm embrace of a watery blanket: the immersion has happened. A distorted expanse of ethereal keyboards, first smeared with field recordings, then left to run its course, until halfway through the track everything cuts out, making room for a guitar and its gentle arpeggios. Then more surges, more lulls, all within an atmosphere of sheer sensory calm.

"The Colour Of Three" continues to vary the theme, with treated guitar stepping in over a hazy, evocative drone backdrop: we're in the deepest abyss here. On "Perfume For Winter" the guitar-keyboard duet paints a watercolour that reaches extremely high emotional peaks, utterly unthinkable back in the days of Hotel Paral.lel. The guitar reclaims its role as absolute protagonist on "Grey Scale", accompanied by a digital piano and a quiet frame of distortion that peeks through now and then, just enough to reinforce the melodic skeleton.

Across the ten minutes of "Glide", a drone interacts with an almost inaudible rhythm and a cosmic haze of faint distortion, before the melody returns once more, soft and sensual, to colour everything in: Rosy Parlane's presence is felt precisely in that "hazy fog", though here he too seems to have to adapt to Fennesz's new cameo, the result ending up sounding more like Biosphere than anything else. "Vacuum", on the other hand, is another almost entirely acoustic interlude, where the space belongs exclusively to melody in yet another keyboard-guitar duet, and "Glass Ceiling" is another portrait of acoustic ambient, with electronics confined to the background. The closing "Saffron Revolution", with its nod to Robert Rich's "Geometry" and its flowing, cathartic expanses, cradles the listener for the final five minutes, carrying them into a parallel universe, before ending on the notes of an acoustic guitar.

Yet another release of remarkable stature, Black Sea completes Fennesz's transfiguration. An ambient music album through and through, with no trace left of what came before, it's the most human, intimate and personal work yet from a musician in constant motion.

Before the year is out, the Austrian collaborates once again with half of Polwechsel, namely Martin Brandlmayr and Werner Dafeldecker, on Till The Old World's Blown Up And A New One Is Created. Incredible as it might seem, three leading lights of the electronic scene produce an intimate, predominantly acoustic work, once again resting on ambient structures. Fennesz, in particular, works almost exclusively as a guitarist, while Dafeldecker is entrusted with the synthetic openings and the thick bass foundation, and Brandlmayr contributes sporadic drum interjections.

In its own modest way, a thoroughly successful work, though hardly groundbreaking, and rich in nuance, further confirming the state of grace enjoyed by both the Austrian and his two fellow musicians.

A year later Fennesz lands his first collaboration outside the electronic realm. This time his partners are the late Mark Linkous and his Sparklehorse, among the leading names of the American lo-fi scene, whose story would end tragically with the leader's suicide the following year. The second meeting between the two, after Fennesz's contribution to "Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain", yields the fifteenth chapter of the In The Fishtank saga, an atypical work for both, highly original and very difficult to pin down. The ambient and dronic catharsis of the latest Fennesz is at times transformed into orchestral architectures almost à la Sigur Rós, elsewhere drawing closer to forms typical of chamber music. Linkous, for his part, alternates between guitar, piano, violin and vocal parts, sometimes electronically treated and barely perceptible ("Goodnight Sweetheart"), elsewhere taking centre stage (the acoustic post-rock ballad "If My Heart", likewise steeped in echoes of the Icelanders).

Each track displays different characteristics from the next, forming an eclectic, colourful work that makes stylistic variety its very strength: without a doubt the finest collaboration in Fennesz's career.

2010 is marked by the release of Knoxville, which finds the Austrian composer once again surrounded by two other key names in sonic improvisation: David Daniell, a figure of central importance to the American electroacoustic experimental scene, and Tony Buck, Australian standard-bearer of free jazz and a member of The Necks. The record of a (needless to say) wholly improvised performance, the EP is a stratospheric testament to the fusion of the three artists' styles, closer to the work of the Fenn O'Berg trio than to anything the three have produced in their respective careers. An avant-garde hybrid, in which Fennesz's and Daniell's guitars interact beautifully with the constantly shifting rhythm set by Buck.

In its most ambient moments ("Antonia"), in its most shape-shifting ones ("Unüberwindbare Wände"), but also in the mathematical cacophony of the closing "Diamond Mind", the performance stays at an extremely high level throughout.

In 2011 Fennesz returns, three years after his last solo release, with an EP, Seven Stars, a continuation of the stylistic exploration begun with Black Sea. The new element across its four tracks is, for the first time, the use of genuinely catchy melodies: where the latter plunged into a deep abyss, "Seven Stars" settles into an ethereal, sun-drenched universe, almost entirely shedding the dark elements of the previous album in favour of brighter, more positive textures. The cradle of synthetic strings on "Liminal" is without doubt the sunniest track of Fennesz's career, "July" unfolds like a journey among the stars with a few debts to the cosmic couriers, "Shift" is once again a floating ambient expanse, while the title track is a genuine electronic song, complete with a 4/4 rhythm keeping time.

Seven Stars pushes the style of the “second Fennesz” to its most stripped-down (without ever trivializing it), brushing against the borders of post-rock and hinting at a renewed interest in pop already nurtured on Endless Summer, one that would resurface again four years later.

Toward the end of the year, almost by surprise, a third collaborative work with Ryuichi Sakamoto saw the light of day. Flumina continues in the same vein as the two previous releases, bringing no real change, but considerably raising the level of emotional transmission in its tracks. The undisputed protagonist, and the only truly "new" element, is the Japanese musician's piano, while the Austrian's drone-soaked electronic textures are brushed into the sonic landscape. Once again the two prove their perfect rapport, and Sakamoto's piano manages to reach even the least attentive listener in a direct and sublime way. While the two previous collaborations had produced a pair of ambient-drone albums that seemed to convey rather little, Flumina, despite bringing no stylistic evolution for either artist, succeeds in carrying ambient music toward dimensions of spirituality and evocation that feel new for both of them, undoubtedly standing as the best of the three albums they composed together.

Before the arrival of his sixth album, Fennesz opens 2012 with a treat reserved for fans: a composition dating back to 2001, titled Liquid Music, written for a multimedia installation by Jon Wozencroft (founder of Touch Music) but never used or released until now. It comes out on a USB stick, a new distribution format Touch had already experimented with for other artists. Musically, the piece fully reflects the Fennesz of 2001, that is, the Fennesz of Endless Summer: a score of treated (almost drone-like) guitar "soiled" by the periodic intrusion of various glitch effects and given rhythm through amplifier-modification techniques.

A few months later, after a four-year hiatus, the Austrian returns with a new full-length solo album. It's the soundtrack to AUN – The Beginning And The End Of All Things, a film by director Edgar Honetschläger. On the album, which is decisively shaped by its particular nature, Fennesz focuses on a fluid, melodic ambient sound, rich in acoustic touches, built around sublime delicacy as its focal point. Aesthetic care remains a first-order concern: the extremely rare blots of noise are injected strategically and meticulously to blend with the silence, before being submerged by the advance of the instruments.

The result is a set of gems that pack stratospheric intensity into just a few minutes, like the overture of "Kae" (which picks up exactly where "Seven Stars" left off), the guitar-resin droplets of "Sekai", the abstract minimal cycle of "Mori", the heavenly opening of "Nemuru", the acoustic and poignant "Nympha", and the quiet, pristine sheen of "Himitsu", a bow to the silent flows of Pan American. In the longer pieces, Fennesz instead gives himself over to boundless scores, as in the cosmic voyage of "Euclides", the muffled, layered Vidna Obmana-esque evocation of "Sasazuka", the redundant flow of "Shinu", softened here and there by glitches never so sweet and restrained, and the closing, sweeping "Hikari". The long, multifaceted "AUN40" deserves a mention of its own, starting out limpid before getting dirty and launching itself into space, as does the shorter, more experimental "AUN80", while the three collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto are all drawn from Cendre, from 2007. It amounts to a delightful take on ambient music of the finest class.

Preceded in 2013 by a curious remix of Fa, the elusive fragment of treated guitar hidden within the walls of dysfunction that make up Hotel Paral.lel, Fennesz's seventh studio album marks his surprising return to Editions Mego. Curiously, it's also his least talked-about record, even though it's also among his most anticipated, given the six-year gap since Black Sea. Dedicated to his hometown, Bécs is still unmistakably Fennesz, yet it's not the new Endless Summer (as the press materials grandly announced), nor a deep, forceful turn like its predecessor. If anything, it's a record to be listened to with the heart and without much effort, a journey made of gentle images and sounds, ones that actually come closer to the post-modern instrumental pop that, in the Endless Summer of 2001, had set the most evolved and polyglot parameters of glitch aesthetics. Dysfunctions, however, are once again scarce, injected drop by drop and always in service of the guitar, which too is largely freed from processing here, left to stage melodic open fields. The sunniest of these is the one that opens the dance on "Static Kings", embroidering over electronic origami and coloring in the unmistakable bass of Werner Dafeldecker and the broken rhythms of Martin Brandlmayr, the first two back to support the Austrian after their joint venture on Till The World… The season that best represents the album's atmospheres, though, is spring: never so intense as on the masterpiece "Liminality", reworked from the overture of "Seven Stars", a ten-minute stroll across a wild beach guided first by arpeggios, embryonic in staging an almost catchy (!) sketch, then unfurled beyond belief, in dialogue with Tony Buck's hushed rhythm and swarms of sweet noise. The latter also takes center stage in the vignette of the title track, a photograph faded by scratches where a brand-new pizzicato stands out, a preamble to an almost cinematic backdrop of synthetic strings, like a polished, smiling "Circassian". The intense, sophisticated "The Liar" stands as the only episode with a nocturnal atmosphere capable of recalling the glitch past, albeit diluted into something closer to a dirty, granular post-rock. The other half-nod to the past is "Sav", a gem built on the analog architectures of Cédric Stevens, which plunges once more into the abyssal depths of "Black Sea". The synthetic symphony of "Pallas Athene" is the perfect counterweight guaranteeing balance, a smooth, polished concentrate of pure ambient music recalling Helios at his finest, pairing well with the bucolic, romantic, almost folk closer "Paroles".

Nearly fifteen years after the masterpiece that decreed that even glitch could be pop, Bécs is nothing other than Fennesz's "pop record", for real this time. The latest landing point of a musician whose path keeps evolving without interruption and, to date, without a single misstep.

Before the year's end, the Austrian artist finds time to complete another "minor" project that curiously ends up gaining far more visibility than the deserving Bécs. It's an EP titled Mahler Remixed, built around samples taken from symphonies by the Bohemian composer, reused as building blocks around which Fennesz weaves his guitar. Despite its loose fidelity to the original intent, the result is four sprawling suites that stand, without question, among the most ambient fruits of the artist's entire career. The crescendo of the first, structured around drone flows for the first ten minutes and an evanescent entry of treated guitar for the remaining nine, essentially sums up Fennesz's art from Venice onward, where he has increasingly specialized in sealing images, sensations and interior and exterior landscapes through the guitar-laptop pairing. More devoted to the pursuit of the ethereal and to the oscillation between fullness and emptiness, the second movement masterfully revisits those layers of drone and noise that have become the trademark of his sonic language. The two closing movements, finally, head straight toward isolationism, intertwining their trajectories with the organic axis of the 12k label: a landing point that is in some ways natural, almost obvious, but no less fascinating for that. Far less successful, however, is his participation in the recorded compendium credited to David Sylvian's early-year tour under the name Kilowatt Hour, alongside Stephan Mathieu as well. The album, titled There’s A Light That Enters Houses With No Other House In Sight, merely transposes the outcome of a project that disappoints in every respect, utterly lacking a real sonic identity, where lifeless, listless flows of glacial, plastic drones serve as a backdrop to the grating spoken-word passages by poet Franz Wright.

Two more collaborations make up the Viennese artist's recorded contribution to music in 2015. The first sees him rejoin the ambitious AirEffect project by Turin duo OZmotic, who describe the operation in these words: "it's an abstract sonification. A work that aims to reproduce a hypothetical black box capable of immersing the listener in the Anthropocene era, that is, the one we currently live in, in which humankind and its activity are assigned as the main causes of territorial, structural and climatic change." The result is a curious comeback to the sounds of late-nineties Viennese electronica, the very same sound celebrated by Mego a few months later with the full reissue of "Fridge Trax". We return, then, to that cold, concrete electronic music built through laptop transfigurations of sound samples and field recordings, which laid the groundwork for the (re)conversion of the laptop and the mechanical, computer-generated sounds it produces into expressive tools — essentially the very root of glitch. The record holds up well on a conceptual level but falls short exactly where the true Mego revolution of the nineties took place, namely in the capacity of sound material to stand on its own, which here is totally sterile and lacking any particular expressive force once extracted from its formal context.

The second collaboration instead sees Fennesz joining forces with King Midas Sound in a meeting that, on paper, is as daring and fascinating as it is, without doubt, risky. On Edition 1, the joint album by the four of them, that element of risk has in fact been largely sidestepped, falling back on a fairly safe formula and a drop-by-drop injection of contributions from the Viennese maestro, which essentially amount to little more than the occasional guitar hum here and there. It's basically a King Midas Sound record with Fennesz brought in to provide a series of contributions that aren't even all that decisive. On its own merits, though, the album holds up well, distinguishing itself from Kevin "The Bug" Martin and Roger Robinson's past work through a general leaning toward the beatless and a further darkening of the typical KMS mood. The broken, stretched-out unease of the past gives way, on the first single "Waves", to a concrete nightmare, made of images and visions never so clearly defined. The aura of mystery that had constantly enveloped the trio's sound also thins out in the dreamlike suspension of "Lighthouse", whose looping arpeggio stands as one of the few traces of Fennesz's presence. The passages that lean most toward the memory of Bristol, namely the excellent "On My Mind" (see Bowery Electric) and "Loving Or Leaving" (straight out of genuine "Pre-Millenium Tension"), ultimately represent the best the album has to offer. Even the closing trio pales in comparison, as it delves into the depths of the nightmare and pushes past its sinister contours: from the supremely elegant "Above Water" to the exquisitely dark-ambient finale of "Our Love", passing through the pop deconstruction of "We Walk Together", where Kiki really does seem to be following in the footsteps of Inga Copeland. In hindsight, this also gives meaning to the introduction of "Mysteries", woven from silences, murmured harmonies and concrete hints. A track that at first might have seemed like the last stronghold of continuity with the arcane sonic trademark of KMS's recent past (helped, no doubt, by the title too), but which, by the end of the listen, turns out to be perhaps even easier to grasp and decipher. An overall solid record that nonetheless has two substantial, significant flaws: suddenly and without warning revealing every ingredient of Martin and Robinson's recipe, and announcing a collaboration that, in practical terms, barely exists.

2015 also marks the twentieth anniversary of the release of Hotel Paral.lel, an unmissable occasion to take stock of the career of an artist who has never truly stopped chasing new creative stimuli. In his multifaceted, ever-shifting path, which took him from prophet of (post-)glitch to figurehead for an entire generation, the central arc of Fennesz's career (that is, the one tied to his proper solo works) still shines today as one of the most intense, extraordinary and decisive chapters in the contemporary history of electronic musical research.

Five years on from Bécs, while confirming its expressive coordinates, the four tracks coherently gathered on Agora arise from conditions similar to those of the Austrian artist's early experimental days. Left without his regular studio for a while, Fennesz had to move his gear into his Viennese home, and once he'd set up the essentials, he recorded some tracks in the complete isolation of his headphones. It's an intimate image, deeply tied to the essence of artistic making, an eminently private practice of imagination followed by execution, detached from the perception and attention of others.

What results is one of the most immersive journeys produced so far, as elemental as it is evocative in its radiant sonic expressionism. Like delicate chromatic layers on a frescoed surface, he almost always juxtaposes harmonic lines with others more jagged and colorless: these are the two souls of his electric guitar, whose shadow trails behind the plucking of the strings like an evanescent foam.

Today, the experiential wonder of Agora might seem almost ordinary, or even faintly dated, but only because its own creator was the first to map out, back in the nineties, the coordinates of the ambient music still to come — a music he never fails to offer a masterful example of.

In 2023, eight years on from AirEffect, a new collaboration with Ozmotic was released, distilling into a partially renewed formula the shared outlook with the Turin duo. Sparked by a discussion on the variable perception of time's passing and on the shared need to push back against contemporary frenzy in favor of more deliberate action, the album drew further energy from the historical moment in which it was put together, effectively becoming a product of the pandemic period.

Expansive synthetic harmonies, immersed in a ceaseless clot of interference and percussive resonance, trace sinuous melodic movements that are torn open by the corrosive action of the guitar, whose cutting lines push the sound toward those intense ascents so often staged by the seminal Austrian composer. And if AirEffect came across as all too aseptic, it's precisely this ability to trigger overflowing emotional surges, alternated with states of estranging stillness, that stands as the greatest strength of Timeless.

Regardless of the construction and formal outcome of each individual path, what dominates is a compositional complexity cared for down to the smallest detail, the result of two distinctive approaches fused into a highly evocative and engaging whole.

It takes a full five years, once again, for Christian Fennesz to return as a solo author of a new immersive trajectory. Five years, in fact, separate the intense Agora from Mosaic, the predecessor from which the album inherits both the revival of his early sounds and the working method that led to its final shape. Not a concept serving as a guiding thread, but a rigid working routine centred on the search for related ideas and sounds, an incremental activity – precisely condensed in the choice of title – that arrived at its finished form by filing down, interlocking and overlaying fragments obtained through distinct processes.

Contrary to what such premises might suggest, the record turns out compact and fully coherent in its parts, built around that very ability to intersect harmony and noisy frequencies which has made the Viennese composer's ambient/post-glitch language so unique. Emblematic of this approach are the six minutes of "Love and the Framed Insects", a constant oscillation of melodic modulations and shifting-grain speckles fused into a highly emotional whole. "Personare" shifts the same ingredients toward dreamgaze territory, while "A Man Outside" explores more intimate dynamics streaked with darker tones.

The art of transfiguring sources also returns here, the ability to break down the guitar's textures until they become unrecognisable, as happens in "Goniorizon", built – according to the liner notes – from the juxtaposition of six hard-rock guitar riffs, converging into a luminescent atmospheric inlay that strongly recalls Venice as well as certain solemn architectures of peak-form Tim Hecker.

Retracing his own footsteps, Fennesz thus offers a further demonstration of his seminal art, a tried-and-tested language that doesn't surprise for its innovation, but still proves to be highly immersive and enveloping.

A couple of months later, the Austrian master returns to offer yet another example of that sonic practice which has rightfully made him one of the leading figures of the contemporary experimental scene. The occasion is provided by his contribution – strictly in digital format – to the output of the Australian platform Longform Editions.

Recorded, as the title states, in the final days of last May, the track unfolds as an ambient flow that once again places the diluted yet always fully recognisable sound of the guitar at its centre. An intent not present from the outset, but prompted by a relistening to a track by the late Rowland S. Howard. Measured phrasing, the reverb of the strings left free to spread until its natural decay, falling into a saturated, finely speckled synthetic bed. A close connection between instrument and electronics that clearly reconnects with the six minutes of "Love And The Framed Insects" – the high point of the latest album – and, even earlier, with the cinematic drifts of Black Sea, highlighting that emotional charge so central to many of his works. Conceived as part of a sound installation for the Volume festival curated by the Art Gallery of NSW, "The Last Days Of May" is designed to blend into and merge with the ambient resonances of New South Wales, but, defying that very intention, it rises instead as a contemplative, all-encompassing presence that captivates with its luminous grace.

Postscript: Fenn O’Berg and the avant-garde of calm chaos

The trio Fenn O’Berg, already mentioned at the start, brings together Fennesz, the Austrian experimenter and Mego boss (first alongside Farmers Manual, later on his own with Editions Mego) Peter Rehberg, and the New York guru Jim O’Rourke. The three first met in the early 90s and soon began collaborating in each other's shows, eventually officially founding the trio in 1999, devoted to live performances always rooted in improvisation. The blending of their styles, and its evolution over time, has produced four albums (the group's output to date) sharing a common root while always leaning toward a more advanced sonic vision.

The trio's first album, titled The Magic Sound Of Fenn O’ Berg and released in 1999, gathers performances recorded in Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg, Paris and Tokyo. It's a collage of field recordings deeply rooted in glitch aesthetics, as shown by the cathartic strands of the two halves of "Shinjuku Baby", the delirious cosmic echoes of "Gurtel Eins" and the languid, withdrawn melody of "Horst und Snail mit Markus". The trio's sound reaches its apotheosis, however, in the closing "Fenn O’Berg Theme", ten minutes in which Brian Eno's ambient vision is adapted into a carefully measured dose of pure claustrophobia.

Three years later, The Return Of Fenn O’Berg consolidates this style, blending the three musicians' ambitions at their best into a maelstrom of sonic sequences in four parts: a brief introduction, "Floating My Boat", preceding three grandiloquent suites overflowing with sonic sprouts. In "Riding Again" O’Rourke's guitar is filtered and broken down to its bare essentials by the two Austrians, giving rise to metallic, cutting languors; "A Viennese Tragedy" is a duet between Fennesz and Pita, trading silent whispers and catastrophic screams by turns, while the shorter "We Will Diffuse You" is almost entirely given over to Fennesz and his clear, understated electro-acoustic lines.

The trio's consolidation comes a full eight years after their first steps, during which all three musicians' paths had evolved toward new horizons: electroacoustic ambient for Fennesz, post-glitch experimentation for O’Rourke, and the solo running of Editions Mego for Rehberg. In Stereo is a studio live album that stands as the true formal and musical peak of applying ambient elements to noise. The opening of "Part III", moving from an initial icy desolation toward a progressive ambient warmth, gives way to Rehberg's glitch gurgles in "Part IV", while the metaphysical balance between abstraction toward the void and cosmic madness of "Part V" can largely be credited to O’Rourke and the electronic side of his most recent sonic explorations.

"Part I" proceeds through near sonic nothingness, the ultimate extreme of the concept of adapting music to its environment, where the latter prevails over and overwhelms the former, as also happens in the purely concrete architectures signed by Rehberg in "Part VII". The conclusion is entrusted to the icy drone of "Part VI", a return to the classic language of dysfunction, caught between generated hiss and cutting reverberations of noise.

Although it stylistically separates the three musicians' sounds compared to previous sessions – since each track seems ideally guided by the sonic canon set by one of them, to which the other two adapt their contributions – In Stereo stands as a true treatise on the symbiotic, harmonious fusion of glitch, ambient and avant-garde, under the banner of a chaos generated on an ambient matrix, treading ground that not even Fennesz himself had ventured onto before.

The trio’s activity would then continue with the release of two LPs, strictly on vinyl, containing excerpts from some performances held in Japan in 2009. Two years later, the same format and the same location characterize In Hell, which gathers excerpts from concerts belonging to the tour that followed the release of In Stereo. The live nature of the record is clearly decisive in drawing the lines that set the new work apart from its predecessor. While the latter, as already noted above, seemed to be a focus on the more conceptual and concrete side of the trio's research, the new improvisations concentrate on more abstract and natural sonic architectures, presenting themselves no longer as a treatise like the previous album, but as a collection of notes, small gems not too closely related to one another, each born under a different roof. This can be heard in the quarter-hour of noisy field recordings that make up "Christian Rocks", capable of evoking a variety of scenarios depending on the listener's interpretation, as well as in the brief ambient-drone brushstrokes of "Omuta Elegy" and "Concrete Onions", the former a nocturnal ambient interlude in pure Fennesz-ian style, able to lull deeply before the latter lets the sun rise. The long stretches of, respectively, avant-garde drone and chilly robotic textures in "Vampires Of Hondori" and "It Came From Nyagoya" instead show the trio's colder, more abstract side, one that can only be warmed by the occasional intervention of a limpid ambient haze.

After two excellent live albums and a genuine masterpiece, Fenn O'Berg confirm their ability to conjure, especially on stage, improvisations of extraordinary technical and musical caliber. While it doesn't boast the same grandiose, unified importance as its older sibling In Stereo, In Hell inherits its sonic coordinates and develops them from another angle, certainly less innovative and overflowing, but still able to highlight once again the trio's incredible creativity and versatility in renewing themselves with every performance, never falling into stasis or sounding repetitive.

In their mathematical, calculated improvisations, Fenn O'Berg conjure performances of the highest caliber, always able to shift shape. Yet another adventure carried out at a consistently high level, the project demonstrates Fennesz's skill and genius in offering innovative sonic ideas that are never an end in themselves, even live, and in managing to fuse them with those of two equally important artists.

Contributions by Michele Palozzo ("Agora") and Peppe Trotta ("Timeless" with Ozmotic, "Mosaic", "The Last Days Of May")

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google