Fennesz

Glitch as a musical genre

It was 1993. As electronic music evolved – dredging up and blending the “learned” past of kraut-rock and ambient with the present of techno and rave, riding a wave of odd time signatures and sonic experimentation – the concepts of noise and ambient met, merging into one another and existing autonomously, without needing to lean on external traits (conceptual research and symbiosis with the surrounding environment). All of this under the banner of electronic saturation and an obsessive attention to detail. What emerged was a music that applies itself to itself, transcending the conceptual realm, wrapping itself around those cyclical structures born of minimalism and later poured into the definition of drone: this was glitch, one of the most important sonic movements of the late millennium. A genre in perpetual evolution, one that ideally began thanks to the German duo Oval and their "Wohnton", the first great musical manifesto of this style. As the years passed, more and more artists embraced the direction set by the duo, chief among them General Magic and Farmers Manual, remaining strongly tied to the parallel ambient scene while staying devoted to the coldest standard-bearers of IDM, such as Boards Of Canada and Autechre.

In 1997, four years later, Mego, the Austrian label active in Vienna's experimental underground, released the first great treatise on glitch aesthetics. The album, while certainly not the genre's founding work, addresses the evolution of post-noise, introducing for the first time the aesthetic traits that would become the standard for nearly all musicians to follow: it's called "Hotel Paral.lel", and it holds the same value for glitch that "Music For Airports" holds for ambient, marking the debut of Christian Fennesz.

Glitch and its aesthetics

Noise and malfunctions, engineered errors, the aesthetics of elegance in sonic terrorism, of frailty and grandiloquence within noise itself. Music made with electronic instrumentation in which the fault, procured, managed and controlled, is understood as a distinct way of conceiving sound, rather than as a negative, sudden and unexpected byproduct. Cleaning with dirt, working to modulate sonic frequencies born of malfunctions, reconsidering them, treating them as a different way of exploiting the medium rather than as a misuse of it.

A form of research with a hidden purpose: to try to conceive of what is regarded as the “wrong” side of a production tool simply as its hidden side – incomprehensible when generated by chance, but carrying equal weight, compared to its “proper” side, when deliberately sought out. These are the defining features of the aesthetic that "Hotel Paral.lel" bestows upon glitch, evolving it and consolidating the insights of its pioneers – an aesthetic thanks to which elements like noise and error, always considered raw materials to be avoided, begin to be placed alongside the traits of elegance and grandiloquence. In the album, this aesthetic is the sonic fulcrum around which the music revolves: it's the latter that moves in order to reach the former.

But the Austrian's most important, most influential and most original evolution would come three years later: its protagonist is "Endless Summer", Fennesz's third album, bearer of a revolution that is both aesthetic and musical at once.

Aesthetics: from end to means

"Endless Summer" is, in some ways, a transitional album. Transitional in the artist's sound, first of all: having left behind the experiences of glitch aesthetics, which he himself had helped no small amount to coin, Fennesz turns the page. What was once the end, the purpose (the aesthetic), becomes the means, the tool. In its place, the new purpose is simply that of any musician outside the conceptual avant-garde: to make music, in both the theoretical and practical sense of the term. There is no longer the goal of reaching a conceptual aesthetic through a union of music and anti-music, nor a formula of ontological parity between error and sound production with the attainment of that aesthetic as the substantial element; rather, music becomes the substance, and any other form of production (instruments, software, errors, malfunctions, noise, melody, rhythm) is reduced to a defining trait, even an accident of that very substance.

The evolution also reverberates on the musical side, proposing a decisive shift away from cold, conceptual angularity, in favor of a greater development of sonic exploration, which becomes varied and multiform, moving through different languages and atmospheres in each track.

The opening "Made In Hong Kong" already hints at the Austrian's new sonic dimension: the defining glitch traits of "Hotel Paral.lel" are replaced by an intermittent cascade of melodic guitar chords, "disturbed" in the typical manner of Fennesz-processing, still bearing, despite everything, a glitch-based matrix. But it's with the title track that the artist fully reveals the hand of his revolution: a piece for treated guitar alone, 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, something that had never happened before, not in the early EPs, nor in the two albums. In "A Year In A Minute" the disturbed glitch coils return to the fore, but once again used 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": Fennesz is no longer an alchemist chasing detailed perfection, but a sculptor applying his instincts to his purest art. "Caecilia" plays on watery, liquid tempo shifts in a moving, touching cybernetic kaleidoscope, this time just a few steps from rhythmic-ambient architectures: it's the first time that feeling surpasses concept, and this too is a manifesto of the change the Austrian was bringing to his music.

"Shisheido" picks up the style of the title track and is perhaps the finest treated-guitar composition ever heard, an intimate, melodic piece, once again aiming at emotion rather than concept, while "Before I Live", before closing out the record, bows to a vintage synthetic minimalism entirely free of noise elements, serving as a hypothetical nod toward the lineage of composers led by Ryuichi Sakamoto, with whom the Austrian would go on to have a fruitful collaboration. In the finale, the ten minutes of meticulous, cosmic-melodic catharsis of "Happy Audio" settle into structures of purely dronic matrix: it's a track that sums up, well ahead of its time, a great many of the elements that would go on to define the subsequent output of numerous artists, a crossroads for the music yet to come.

Glitch after Endless Summer

"Endless Summer" would become a cornerstone for the work of a number of musicians. Foremost among them were contemporaries Biosphere and BJNilsen/Hazard, standard-bearers respectively for ambient-dub and for a brand of glitch that was at once measured and frenetic. But the album's influence would also be felt among names tied to the "historic" movement: Florian Hecker, Russell Haswell and their friend Peter Rehberg, aka Pita, would draw on this new conception while still holding firm to their avant-garde roots, while Oren Ambarchi, Philip Jeck and Phil Niblock would revisit minimalist themes and apply them to their own ambient scores. Even Hildur Ingveldardottir Gudnadottir would build a career outside Mùm devoted to the sonic innovations of Fennesz-style treatments, processing her violin through software and later linking up with a strand of avant-garde chamber music alongside other Touch artists, such as Soliman Gamil.

"Endless Summer" thus confirms Fennesz's status at the summit of the modern music scene, by this point well beyond the boundaries of glitch. Setting aside the genre's typical aesthetic should not, however, be mistaken for an abandonment of the sounds that define it: "Endless Summer" is still a glitch album — what changes is the way the genre itself is approached.

Music after Endless Summer

The number of figures caught up in the wake of "Endless Summer" would actually spill beyond the world of electronic music, as well as saturating it: suffice it to mention the stylistic shifts of two names like Boards Of Canada — cited here as contemporaries, yet unmistakably influenced by the drone music of Tim Hecker (itself born, among other things, out of this very album) both on their masterpiece "Geogaddi" and on the recent EP "The Campfire Headphase" — and David Sylvian, who moved from the smooth, elegant, new-age-tinged scores of "Dead Bees On A Cake" to a pure blend of glitch (complete with a collaboration with Fennesz himself) and avant-garde on "Blemish".

The importance of "Endless Summer" within the music scene of the new millennium is therefore immense: a glitch record that goes beyond glitch, anticipating trends as well as the electro-acoustic turn that Fennesz himself would take on his next work, the equally wonderful and essential "Venice". A forward-looking record, capable of reshaping the coordinates of a movement and a body of research, of inventing and of influencing. A record that is, in effect, transitional: from an aesthetic of dysfunction to one of pure sound, from glitch to its offshoots, from minimalism to modern drone, from the twilight of the twentieth century to the dawn of the new millennium.

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06/08/2012