Aside from a couple of respectable collaborations and some soundtrack work, Christian Fennesz hasn't released a proper solo album since the album Black Sea, which came out on Touch WAY back in 2008. On Becs, Fennesz returns to the label that introduced him to the world, in Editions Mego; and he pretty much continues along the same path that he set for himself on that last album he recorded for them, the much lauded Endless Summer from 2001. That was a fracturous record of polygonal melodies bathed in a candy-crush fuzz of pixelated, shoegazing blur, always alluding to the sunkissed glow of the California Dream, whatever that may be. Becs may not have the advantage of following up one hell of a single by Fennesz (in the very late '90s, he covered The Beach Boys and The Rolling Stones, the latter of which was originally commissioned for tUMULt's Painted Black anthology!), whereby he contextualized his sonic dislocation within the lineage of rock'n'roll and all of its mythologies of dissent, rebellion, sex, and whatnot. Yeah, it's a tough act to follow; but Becs is a wildly adventurous album with a substantial parity when it comes to the risk/reward equation. A heavily flanged, blindingly bright corona of digital treatments surrounds the Fennesz' guitar sound at the album's introduction, with all of the soft melodies buried in twinkling electronics and mirrored refractions. Fennesz follows this with a detuned alarm-call pulse that forms an insistently crawling rhythmic structure blasted with a malleable distortion, which in turn he counterpoints with a gorgeous, cathedral drone of sustained harmonics. An incremental retinal burn of guitar distortion shapes the brilliant track "Liminality" built upon a beautifully bittersweet, slowcore guitar chord whose roots lie in Slint, Codeine, or maybe even the Durutti Column. Sparkling ambient passages beget discordant piano treatments akin to a computer-cracked Angelo Badalamenti which in turn beget more blossoming noise. Fucking brilliant.
Which came first Tim Hecker or Christian Fennesz? If one is to merely look at the discographies of the twin kings of digitally tricked out guitar sculpting, the chronological answer is obvious: Christian Fennesz. But in the four years that have transpired between his brilliant album Venice and the 2008 opus Black Sea, Fennesz must have seen a younger protege in Tim Hecker coming up in the rear view mirror with his own dramatic sound for smeared guitar whose beauty is similarly rendered through error. Not only does Black Sea feel like a response to Tim Hecker's work, it also stands as Fennesz' most fully realized album, perhaps even more so than the sunburst explosion of meta-pop on Endless Summer.
Fennesz works best in the cold, with ice, snow, and frost dusting the strings of his guitar and seeping into the circuitry of his computer; and the cold landscape is exactly where he situates himself on Black Sea. Not surprisingly, Touch's Jon Wozencroft perfectly matches a photograph of an abandoned train track set onto a barren wintry landscape, looking a hell of lot like the photographs that Anselm Keifer uses as a background over which he dumps tar, paint, cement, lead, ash, and whatnot into his alchemical paintings.
Black Sea opens with the fizzling crunch of digital errata getting mangled even further by digital means, with Fennesz sculpting a sea swell of a half melody in the distance. Considering the contemplative and cold nature of the rest of the album, this track is a bit discordant; but Fennesz isn't going for the Menche / Merzbow attack, just something of a wake-up call. But gradually, even this first burst of noise quells in a plaintive round of finger picking on the guitar, out of which a beautiful cloud of vaporized drone begins to amass and a subharmonic throb of distortion settles in. These sounds become the template for the rest of the album, all wrapped in gray, muted timbres. When noise bursts through Fennesz' circuits, the attack almost immediately blurs into clustered loops, drones, and sympathetic noises to smooth the edges into a shimmered glisten of remarkable beauty that exhibits a cold, overcast, and gray soundsmear, certainly on par with the sleepytime shoegaze of My Bloody Valentine. After an exceptional collaborative track with Rosy Parlane of lunar landscape ambience riddled with dust before opening into a hymnal melody, Black Sea comes to an end with one of Fennesz' best tracks ever in "Saffron Revolution," with its soaring vapor trail of tone-bent guitar drone and a majestic crescendo of sustained, soft focus distortion. A truly marvellous piece of work.
Experimental electronica (particularly the glitch techno and collage work on the Mille Plateaux label) is getting dangerously close to self parody, with the definitions of very specific electronic music forming ever increasing legions of devoted followers
Fennesz' third album -- the aptly titled "Endless Summer" -- picks up where his ep of Rolling Stones / Beach Boys covers left off with a digital dispersion of "fun in the sun" rock mythologies. While there are no obviously discernable pop culture references, Fennesz builds a sound that really is quite summery from odd duets between disintegrating acoustic guitar strums and the coalescence of digital errata. Thus, this album has the feeling of the classic Beach Boys sound, but very little of that structure. These are NOT Beach Boys covers; but if he said they were, we'd have no basis to call him a liar. Regardless, Fennesz's "Endless Summer" is just fucking great.
Over the past couple of years, it has become apparent that there are two modes of production for the esteemed Austrian electro-glitch artist Christian Fennesz. On one hand, there are the studio driven productions where he focuses on the digital decomposition of various guitar signatures (exemplified within the "Plays" single whose beautiful cover of The Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black" was originally commissioned for the ill-fated "Painted Black" compilation -- due soon on tUMULt), and on the other, there's the live improvisation techniques he brings to any number of European free-jazz / new music ensembles (i.e. MIMEO, FennO'Berg, Polweschel, Golden Tone, Orchestra 33 1/3, etc.). While his technical prowess and expressive immediacy can be quite graceful on those electro-improv recordings, Fennesz excels in the studio.
"Field Recordings 1995:2002" -- which is NOT a collection of Chris Watson-esque field recordings -- picks up some of the studio driven scraps that had been released on compilations, special projects, and film soundtracks during the past 7 years. Of particular note, "Field Recordings 1995:2002" features all of the cuts from his amazing "Instrument" debut EP released on Mego in 1995. Even before such incredibly powerful programs as SuperCollider and Max/MSP had been as widely available as they are now, Fennesz has always been interested the atomization and disintegration of digital recordings at their most basic level. While all of these tracks from "Instrument" still sound great by today's standards, there is a strong connection with the sampledelica guitar trickery of '90s UK post-rock of Seefeel, Main, and Disco Inferno as hyperactive, time-stretched kaleidoscopes of post-MBV distortion and skittering electronica rhythms. The other tracks include reworkings of the soundtrack composed for "Blue Moon," remixes Fennesz did for Ekkehard Ehlers and Stephan Mathieu, and compilation tracks from "Decay" (Ash International), "RKKCD13" (Reckankreuzungklankewerkzeuge), "Clicks and Cuts 2" (Mille Plateaux) and "Krev X" (Ash International) -- that last contribution being a digitally fuzzed-out cover of America's "A Horse With No Name."
While many 'loose-end' collections run the risk of being full of cast-away tracks from the proper albums, Fennesz' "Field Recording" is as good as any of his previous albums, and shouldn't be missed!
Originally released in 1997, now finally available again, the debut full length from Viennese experimentalist guitarist Christian Fennesz. Long before the fuzzed out blurry sounds of folks like Tim Hecker and other DIY dronesters were everywhere, and the technology for processing sound was super readily available, Fennesz was a laptop alchemist, a guitar deconstructionist, transforming his axe into a strange sound making device, capable or producing the most gorgeous and alien of sounds.
Hotel Parallel is a lot different than later Fennesz releases. Where those were soft focus and sun baked, glistening and shimmering, Hotel Parallel is much darker, more abrasive, harder edged, the sounds much more intense and brutal, but without losing any of their beautiful mystery.�
Listening to this again now, it's kind of mind blowing to believe the sounds here are all guitar. From dense swirls of speaker clogging hiss, to glimmering Niblockian stretches of static high end blur, to tangled swirls of glitch and swoop, backwards fffffft and gnarled melody, to grinding low end chunks of sound, angular and abrasive, to barely there billows of whispery low end, streaked with muted melody, to epic My Bloody Valentine like cacophonies of distorted pop ambient almost house music to super minimal Chain Reaction throb and pulse. Some of these tracks sound like the recent Field record, or some of the more abstract Kompakt stuff, but this was 10 YEARS AGO! AND IS ALL GUITAR! How the fuck do all of these sounds come out of a guitar? Who the hell cares? An absolutely gorgeous breathtaking epochal work of guitar experimentation, that few have rivaled in the decade since...
This reissue is super swank, six panel digipak, printed in green on white with subtle spot varnish, it includes some extra stuff too, a bonus track from a long out of print 7" (limited to 100 copies) from 1996, a super beautiful droney blurry murkscape, and an absolutely breathtaking video, perfectly reflecting the sound of Fennesz visually, all glitchy and grainy and so gorgeous...
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4 short compositions on an adorable little 3" compact disc by this brilliant electronica / guitarist from Vienna. Shards of processed guitar noise filtered into the tropes of musique concrete that end up sounding like a more active Achim Wollschied. Further on the composition, Fennesz allows the delicate strum of the guitar to infiltrate the barrage of noise, giving nods to John Fahey, but in a much more interesting way than the recent interpretations of Fahey by the Chicago post-rockers.
Latest in Table Of The Elements' series of 'Guitar' 12"s, and this is the one everyone has been waiting for, Christian Fennesz' June. Hot on the heels of Black Sea, which was a recent aQ Record Of The Week, comes this single sidelong drift of gnarled guitars and pixelated soundscapes. But unlike the blurred beauty of Black Sea, June is something else entirely, a creaking, clanging, chiming post industrial landscape of processed guitars, rendered here in the shape of distant pulsing buzz, in shards of jagged chords ringing out and dissipating into the ether, and deep groaning waves of blackened Wolf Eye-d rumble, imagine even a super softened Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, this is less blissed out shoegazey dreamscapery, and more carving dark sonic figures from deep shadow, ominous, sinister, haunting, all words that most definitely apply to past Fennesz recordings, but usually those elements were lurking beneath a shimmery sun dappled exterior, a soft patina of whirling muted buzz draped over a roiling black sea of sound below, but here, those sounds are allowed to creep to the fore, creating a seriously dystopian chunk of cinematic black ambience, the guitars unleashing a murky black fog, that while lovely cloaks all the other sounds in a mysterious blackened grit, but it is Fennesz after all, so the corrosive crumbling darkness does eventually get smoothed out, transformed into into a soft, rolling, burnished shimmer, deep tones dreamily undulating and floating weightless in an expanse of hushed thrum, but by then, the track is winding to a close. Dark stuff from Fennesz, and we like it. A lot!
Pressed on super thick, swirled milky brown vinyl. One sided, the other side with an awesome etching by Savage Pencil, housed in a thick PVC sleeve, and of course, as always, VERY LIMITED!
Austrian electronic glitch-guitar superstar Christian Fennesz does his thing in Australia, and this live limited edition cd (not cd-r, unlike other similarly plainly-packaged releases on Touch) is the documentation. "Live at Revolver" picks up where Fennesz' masterful "+47É 56' 37"" left off with rich buzzing tonalities forming melancholic almost-melodies topped with sporadic events of domestic clatter. A requiem for a microwave oven, perhaps? Nonetheless this may be for fans only, as it's not quite 17 minutes long! Still, this is recommended, as those 16 minutes and 34 seconds are quite good.
Live record from everybody's favorite laptopping guitarist (or guitar playing laptopper) Christian Fennesz, released on the new (to us at least) Japanese label Headz, in a gorgeous sleeve designed by Touch's Jon Wozencroft. A little over 40 minutes of gorgeous, squelching, hazy shimmer. The disc starts off with a burst of scratchy barbed wire static, before the submerged melodies and summery warmth slowly rise to the surface. As the disc progresses Fennesz's guitar surfaces more and more, as lazily strummed acoustic guitars dodge digital crunch, and fingerpicked notes are captured and sent careening wildly through the thick wash of digital whir, crackly sputter, and gritty fuzz. Moments of melodic tranquility bob weightlessly on a sea of crackling glitches and resonant flickers of crumbling distortion, as the melodies struggle to stay afloat. So completely lovely and at the same time so ferocious and harsh, a dichotomy of sound that seems to define the glorious sonic explorations of Fennesz.
In any other hands, the very idea of remixing Mahler might not only be preposterous but abhorrent; but Christian Fennesz is far from the average electronic musician. After all, he beautifully fragmented the fun-fun-fun-in-sun pop of the Beach Boys for his iconic Endless Summer album; and he's more reverential of the original Mahler material than on he was of the source material for Endless Summer. It is but a sliver of the Mahler oeuvre that Fennesz extracts, the yearning harmonies and lush orchestral swells (as opposed to Mahler's counterpointing brass marches of bombast and discord); yet Fennesz deftly layers elongations and dilations of tone into impressionist pools of reflective sound, flecked with his rasping buzz of tricked out digital noise and a couple of Philip Jeck style intrusions of antique turntable surface noise with a haunted melody struggling to peer outward. Fennesz further injects his aesthetic into that of Mahler's by reprising the guitar melody he penned on "Liminality" from his 2014 Becs album. This languid strum settles into the bed of electrical hums and soft-moss orchestral drones, though it is dramatic leap from the 19th century into the 21st from one Austrian legend to another.
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Strange that we've never written anything about this album, the second album from Vienna's guitar 'n' laptop rock star Christian Fennesz. Originally released on Mego back in 1999, this album has gone through several pressings, fortunately always preserving the same core tracklisting, although the art has shrunk down to a digipack for the 2008 edition on Touch. The two albums that came after this album - Endless Summer and Venice - may stand as his perfect albums, one obviously summery and the other decidedly wintery; if anything, this is his shoegaze record, as he deftly wrangles with hurricane-strength distortion and tempers that with a post-MBV blur of narcotic auditory bliss. Throughout, Fennesz merely alludes to melody buried beneath all of the fuzzy drones and tempestuous noise, with pixel pointed interludes indicative of the signature Mego inflorescence for digital errata that he and Pita helped define. This is clearly the album that was the major inspiration for Tim Hecker and his digiscapes of guitar drones and 8-bit noise; but this album also bridges back to earlier pioneers of electronic adventurousness such as Main (especially Motion Pool) and The Hafler Trio (like Intoutof). If you've not checked this out, there's no better time than the present.
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The Austrian avant-guitarist offers four tracks of beautiful guitarscapes tricked out through his signature glitched-n-blurred processing. Hardly cold for a slab of digitalia, the opening track "Liminal" is one of Fennesz' more structured numbers, built from a simple chord progression on his acoustic guitar, that then stomps on a Mogwai-ish distortion box for at least one burst of incendiary soft-loud-soft dynamics. All of the sounds prickle, squish, and splutter amidst a swarming sea of digitized pixels that reassemble themselves as echoes and ghosts of Fennesz' original guitar playing. "July" darkens the hue quite a bit with a warbling bass that looks back to the post-rock explorations of Rothko or Labradford. "Shift" is one of Fennesz' finer drone-centric moments that builds a hallowed melody out of a cavernous wash of sun bleached tones, and the title track is a collaborative effort with Steven Hess on drums, resulting in a slowcore tune fleshed with all of Fennesz' digital ephemera.
FYI, there is a compact disc scheduled for release in September 2011, for those not so keen on the vinyl format. Oh yeah, this has been cut at 45rpm, so you know that we'll be playing this at 33 as well!
This one probably needs very little in the way of description, a new archival release from guitar/laptop maestro Christian Fennesz, the latest from limited edition UK tape label Tapeworm, gathering up an eclectic collection of samples, which were used to create various recordings from 1989 until 1996. Which means maybe some of these will definitely sound familiar, even here in there yet to be Fennesz-ed state, offering a glimpse into the creative process for sure, but functioning fairly well as an album proper, albeit a somewhat fragmented album, short sonic selections, from murky glistening shimmer, to strange creaks and glitches, to warped acoustic guitar strum, to skipping stuttering electronic dronescapes, to psychedelic textural noise blowouts, to haunting loops, a dizzying array of sound and texture and timbre, many of these pieces already sounding practically finished (if it weren't for their brevity), gorgeous and hazy and melodic, mysterious and otherworldly, others simple, obvious building blocks for a bigger whole, the (perhaps hundreds of) fragments seamlessly sequenced into a constantly shifting, ever evolving, fractured and fantastical soundscape, that would also appeal to fans of Philip Jeck, with its weird sensation of skipping and glitching and recontextualization, the short sample format reminiscent of flitting from record to record, but this is obviously essential listening for Fennesz fans, a perfect companion for his records proper.
LIMITED TO ONLY 500 COPIES. With cool Savage Pencil cover art!
The master returns. To teach the young ones a thing or two about the guitar. And about turning that guitar into something wholly other.
It's been a while since we've heard from Christian Fennesz, but thankfully, very little has changed, he can still take a guitar and a laptop and create a dense world of dreamlike shimmer, with a deftness that puts most other soundmakers to shame. So here's a brief two song taste of what Fennesz has been up to lately. And if this single is any indication, the upcoming full length is going to be the drone-y dreamy disc of the year!
But for now, we'll take these two, and just play them over and over. The A side finds the guitar completely transformed into muted smears, the overall sound a shifting sea of corrosive crumbling distortion, but rendered in breathless whispers and washed out hues. The metallic thrum is spread out into soft shimmers, a murk that would almost sound industrial if it wasn't so pretty.
The flipside is more guitar oriented, a steel string acoustic, the melodies branching out in simple softly strummed strands, a skeletal framework for swirls of soft hiss and chunks of fragmented melody drifting by like leaves on a forest stream. The sound is like some simple folk music, broadcast via a staticky short wave radio, but beneath the guitar, and the dreamy hiss, are lush, stately swells melodic and cinematic, that infuse the track with a dark, but sweetly sorrowful elegiac quality. Gorgeous.
THIS AQ RECORD OF THE WEEK FROM A DECADE AGO, NOW ON VINYL FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME!!
Christian Fennesz' 2001 album Endless Summer firmly established him as one of the electronic avant-garde's greats with his delirious balance of hotwired digital glitches and a nostalgic revisitation of summery pop sensibilities. The assimilation of overloaded digital filtering technologies and guitar driven song fragments has continued to be Fennesz' strongest asset through his celebrated arrangements for David Sylvian's Blemish album, and has even earned him a curious forthcoming collaboration with Sparklehorse! Venice is his fourth studio album and clearly stands as his best work to date. According to Asphodel's Naut Humon, Venice was almost a doomed project, as Fennesz' hard drive crashed less than a month before he needed to deliver the record to Touch. With about a quarter of the album salvageable, he scrambled to reassemble the album from memory. While it's hard to say if this time constraint benefited or detracted from his process, the album itself is stunningly good. Just as Endless Summer channelled the acid fried spirit of Brian Wilson, Venice also finds itself an album with a muse: Kevin Shields. There have always been short-circuited elements of My Bloody Valentine shot from Fennesz' tricked out guitar sound; but Venice pushes Fennesz affection for shoegazer's bucolic atmospheres and sublime melodies to the forefront with marvelous results. Each song appears to be nerve-rattlingly familiar; yet just as Endless Summer invoked Brian Wilson without ever resorting to self-conscious quotation, each of his tracks glides along the same oceanic currents authored by Slowdive, AR Kane, Ride, Loveliescrushing, and The Cocteau Twins. Again, no direct references can be heard in Venice; rather Fennesz taps directly into the hopelessly romantic sentimentality of shoegazer music and replicates it perfectly behind a light dusting of digital pixels.
The one track which gives us pause on Venice is the single collaboration with David Sylvian. While this track on its own works as good if not better than anything on their aforementioned Blemish album, it sticks out like sore thumb against the sublimely textured ambience which dominates the remainder of the record. Here on the double lp redux of Venice, Fennesz had the sense to lead the second lp with that track, thus remedying much of the disconnect found with the cd listening experience. Venice stood as one of the finest electronic albums of 2001; and it's still an excellent album a decade later, now fleshed out in its 10th Anniversary vinyl edition with two short bonus tracks of pastoral, pixelated blur, "The Future Will Be Different" and "Tree", presumably recorded at the same time.
It's fitting that the year closes with a breathtaking collaboration between Christian Fennesz and Ryuichi Sakamato, as 2011 was a great year for both of them individually. This past summer Fennesz released Seven Stars, his first solo recording in almost three years. Sakamato not only teamed up with Alva Noto for perhaps their best collaboration yet, Summvs, but also hit the road with his legendary old band Yellow Magic Orchestra to rave reviews.
This is not the first time these two musical visionaries have collaborated, as they released a great ep back in 2005 that left us very hungry for them to come together again. With Flumina they have created one of the most patient, subdued, and beautiful records of the year. In fact, a few of us are already rearranging our end of year best of lists to make sure we include this, as the record has already seeped so deep into our subconscious, in just the few weeks its been out. Sakamoto's fragile piano playing and Fennesz' gauzy and blurry guitar sound glide in and out of each other to create a melancholic daydream of sound. Much like some of our favorite Harold Budd records and collaborations, these tracks really do sound as if they are unraveling slowly from the heavens. We've been going to sleep with one of the discs playing and then starting our day slowly with the the alternate disc, as its such a perfect record for the space between sleeping and dreaming.
We also really love that despite the use of their laptops, the record seems so minimally processed. This isn't about forced static or manipulative feedback, but instead a powerful restraint in sound that allows each note to leave such a lasting impact. Highly recommended!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Fennesz and Pita (ne Peter Rehberg) hail from Mego Records from Vienna, while Mike Harding runs Touch and Ash International out of the UK. Collectively, this trio (and their powerbooks) tweek digital glitches and crunchy blasts of computer noise into persistant rhythmic clashes that culminate into tumultous rumbling beats. A close listen will reveal a pretty stellar computing fuck up, when one of the three powerbooks sounded the Macintosh preset error sound 'Droplet'. Even with this, 'Di-n' is pretty fantastic digital noise record. 21 minutes on one-sided vinyl.
Remember that Spire record on Touch a while back? A series of Organ works, by a handful of the usual avant drone suspects: Fennesz, Jeck, Biosphere, Tsunoda, Ambarchi, Watson and others�
Well, this 7" is part of a series of limited eps, based on the Spire recordings. The first we think. And is a tribute to Arvo Part, and to "mystic minimalism". Charles Matthews who was featured on the original Spire recordings, playing the massive pipe organ, is the player here as well, and both Jeck and Fennesz get a side to do what they want with those original sounds.
Fennesz turns the sound of the organ into a minimal whir, gentle washes of grit and whispery buzz, long tones subtly pulsing, deep rich chords, soft swells, gently effected and transformed into haunting alien drones. Those drones infused with melancholic melodies and deep metallic reverberations. Truly mystical and minimal.
Jeck however is much less reverent. Choosing much like he did on the original Spire recording to try something more aggressive, more dark, more noisy, and much less soothing, his side is an almost industrial soundscape or crunch and buzz, the organ's notes transformed into bell like tones, chopped up into jagged melodies, almost like someone is flipping stations, the melody lurching suddenly from note to note, jarring and uneasy, but at the same time hauntingly compelling. The tones are dense and distorted, lots of smeared feedback, thick clouds of pixilated grit and deep droning walls of whir, a super intense and extraordinarily noisy approach from Jeck, something we're definitely interested in hearing much more of in the future.
As always, comes houses in an immediately recognizable Touch style sleeve, with gorgeous Jon Wozencroft photos and design.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Mego has been really getting into these cute litte 3" cds... They have a similar fetish object quality as the ultra limited and therefore highly collectible Drone Records series, but for the more digitally minded. This collaborative release between Rosy Parlane (former partner with Dean Roberts in Thela) and the swashbuckling Christian Fennesz is a fluid stream of digital pops and timestretched glitches. At first their duet fades from the glitch worship towards something resembling fragments of an Arvo Part vocal chorale, but returns to the rhythmic hard disc edits recalling Oval's "Systemische."
Had any random drone 'n' piano album been released on Windham Hill and featured some laptop jockey blurring the lilting piano notes of George Winston, would you even consider buying it? Well, we know Andee would. But no matter how good it was, for most of you, the answer would probably be no. Even though certain factions here at Aquarius have long held the belief that there's not much sonic difference between the pastoral impressionism of Windham Hill and the pastoral impressionism of Kranky, the major contextual differences between the two institutions have prevented many from buying into this argument. The full collaborative album between Christian Fennesz and Ryuichi Sakamoto also figures into this distinctly Aquarian logic to dismantle any notions of what is 'cool.' This is an album of drifting soundscaping for pretty, pretty piano and pretty, pretty treatments, whose external contextualization drives the reading about the music more than the music itself. Christian Fennesz, of course, is the highly acclaimed guitarist with an exceptional grasp of how to digitally mangle the sounds from his guitar into impressive dynamism that brings a poetic, human touch to digital deconstruction. Ryuichi Sakamoto hails from the seminal electronic group Yellow Magic Orchestra and has more recently taken to Erik Satie-like compositions for shadowy gestures upon the piano. Furthermore, Cendre was released on Touch, a record company considered by many to be *the* elite label for sound art. Everything points to what should be a slam dunk of an album; and in many ways, this album succeeds in what it strives for. It's doubtful that Fennesz and Sakamoto would have qualified their intentions as 'New Age' but Cendre's polite piano melodies that drift amidst a benevolent ambience share more than a few parallels to the quintessential Windham Hill sound. We'll leave it in your hands, oh trusted Aquarian shopper, as to whether you'll see a comparison between Christian Fennesz and George Winston as favorable or not. Some of us certainly do.
AQ customers definitely don't need an introduction to Christian Fennesz. We've long been enraptured by his laptopped guitarscapes, all warm and fuzzy, sunny and ethereal, rich and thick and totally memerizing. And certainly no one should need an introduction to Ryuichi Sakamoto either, after fronting the Yellow Magic Orchestra for thirty years as well as producing numerous solo recordings, including his amazing recent collaborations with Alva Noto. So it's pretty exciting to see these two hook up for this lush and gorgeous laptop excursion into dreamy underwater mood music and hazy glitched out ambience. This brief twenty minute piece was recorded live in Rome in 2004 and is the precursor to a forthcoming full length. A simply perfect slab of ambient abstraction and delicate dreaminess. Moody and mysterious, drifting notes and thick chordal swells wash over shuffling minimal rhythms, sleepy summertime shimmer and soaring sheets of dramatic and deconstructed melody float and flutter, shift and sway. So beautiful.
Subtitled "an acoustic approximation of Oswald Weiner's legendary 'Bioadapter', phase one" this album offers several suggestions for the listener's environment. The lights should be dim, the listener should lie down (possibly in a tank of water with underwater speakers), and earplugs should be worn. As Aquarius Records is painfully unequipped to properly listen to this record (not even a large oil drum I could cram into, nor the time to lie down on the counter and listen to the record while tending to customers, and damn if I'll wear earplugs to listen to something this quiet), the review will no doubtably miss the mark on this one. But for sake of commerce or criticism or simply because you've read this far already, here it goes.
"Music For An Isolation Tank" is a paranoiac black box composition replete with digital fuckery and laptop squiggles (ala Mego / Rhiz) sublimated into subaquatic headrattling lowend. Pure tones
merge into slowed down somatic rhythms that attempt to bring the bodies hectic pace down to a more relaxed state. High tension flanges rupture the digitized drones and pulsate erratically as neurotic distractions to the computerized bliss. There are some definite moments where the trio successfully articulate a synergy between man and machine, but for the most part the album falls nicely within the laptop aesthetic of 'lowercase glitchery'.
While not a proper new Fennesz 'album' per se, Aun is in fact a soundtrack to a new film by Austrian director Edgar Honetschlager, incorporating a few collaborative pieces previously released on the album Cendre, which found Christian Fennesz teamed up with pianist Ryuchi Sakamoto. Surprisingly, those tracks, already pretty cinematic, fit perfectly amidst Fennesz' original music for Honetschlager's film. And while we've yet to see the film, the music on its own is lovely, and hauntingly contemplative, especially the tracks with Sakamoto, the pointillist piano lending the music a certain gravitas, moody and melancholy. While the rest of the tracks find Fennesz weaving lush tapestries of deep glowing drones and warm whirring ambience, opening track "Kae" is dense and thick, a lush gauzy melodic stasis rife with buried melodies, the sort of sound that evokes those time lapse nature films, plants breaking through the soil, blossoming, then withering and dying. Poignant and moving, quite a feat for a track that barely cracks two minutes. Later on the soundtrack, Fennesz returns to the guitar, letting gentle strums and delicately picked notes become gently obliterated by clouds of digital errata, transforming the sound into a glitchy dreamfolk drift, those bits of glitchguitar ambience surrounded by thick slabs of deep dense digital dronemusic, tracks like "Euclides" imbuing what would otherwise be an ethereal shimmer, with an almost black hole density, while other tracks display a knack for melding airy ambience with gristled laptop buzz, the results sometimes spare and ghostly, other times bleak and blackened, but always haunting and lovely. In some ways, the sounds are almost too perfect as a soundtrack, the sort of abstract minimal ambience that seems to underpin most movies these days, but close listening reveals that this is more than rote ambience, instead, each track here is a dense multilayered mini-symphony, that even sans visuals, offers much to discover on repeated listens, and seems to blossom before the listener's ears, the sound rich with the promise of endless sonic discovery.
This is pretty much an aQ dream team, guitarist / lap top technician / abstract dronehaze alchemist Christian Fennesz, teamed up with Tony Buck, drummer for outsider minimal jazz legends the Necks, and David Daniell, guitarist for the late great slowcore combo San Augustin, all gathered up for a night of abstract improv noise making.
The session begins with a slow building minimal post rock meander, and over the course of about 8 minutes, the sound grows from spidery and shimmery, a sort of washed out melodic drift, all sun dappled and gauzy, to full on ferocious free form psychedelic freakout, an explosive squall of woozy guitar chords underpinning wild clouds of octopoidal drum damage, Buck letting loose, no Necks-like restraint here, the climax of the track like a free jazz Godspeed / White Heaven hybrid, while weirdly, beneath the skree and crunch, the guitars still moan mournfully, giving the jam, even at its noisiest a strange sort of instrumental pathos.
The second number begins with a shimmer of cymbals, some swirling looped guitar, flurries of muted percussion, a heaving hazy whirl of abstract drone, which about halfway through seems to suddenly expand into a slow motion supernova of smoldering sound, building to a blast of Nadja-like shoegaze dronedoomdrift, before fading back into a reverbed echo of the chaos that came before.
Buck then creates a drum drone using just a snare roll and some cymbal sizzle, while Daniell and Fennesz add their own shadowy minimalism, the washed out ambience the most Fennesz sounding of the bunch, as if all of the sounds created were winding their way through his guitar, then his laptop and out through the speakers, the cymbals getting more and more busy, sounding like rainfall, another sonic climax, but this one a more subdued subtle bit of cymbal driven swell, starkly dramatic and so lovely. Finally, the trio finish these off with another bit of softly chaotic clatter, the scattered bits of percussion and jagged shards of guitars, slowly coalescing into something rhythmic and driving, building to a gloriously effulgent climax, a blinding spray of prismatic sound, a high end ur-drone, that fades gradually again, allowing the set to settle to the ground, in a soft fog of hiss and sizzle, rumble and whir. Fucking fantastic.
The bad news is, the vinyl version of this is somehow already out of print, so we only have 4 or 5 copies, and that's IT. But, we WILL have the cd version next week, got some of those coming from the label (everyone else is out!), so if you want that, just ask...
With just the mention of Jim O'Rourke, this will sell itself. But for those of you out there who have been taken in by his recent pop aesthetics, we should state the warning that this is not a pop album. Collaborating with powerbook geniuses Christian Fennesz and Pita Rehberg (both from the venerable Mego collective), O'Rourke sheds the pop schtick for a streaming barrage of digital splices which are predominantly needling synthetic tones and random clicks, but sporadically reference a rhythm or a melody before being mutilated into the digital cacophony.
The second production from the Fenn O' Berg laptop trio of Christian Fennesz, Jim O'Rourke, and Peter "Pita" Rehberg adds just a bit more structure to the previous collaboration, but falls in line with the increasing number of Max / MSP improvisations that have been coming out as of late. The general feel for the album retains some of the digitally deconstructed dreaminess found on some of the Stephan Mathieu and Ekkehard Ehlers recordings, but with the additional collaged pitter patter of digital squiggles and clicks. Where Fenn O'Berg succeeds is in their sporadic use of fuzzy rhythms, post-acid melodies, and antiquated samples from carnival music and melodramatic film scores. All of these, of course, get the pixel treatment.
Killer slice of Bay Area psych from this new outfit made up of members of Comets On Fire, Drunk Horse and Nudity, a fierce blast of murky fuzzed out seventies style heavy psych hard rocking, that sounds SO much like the genuine artifact, wouldn't be at all difficult to believe that this was some lost seventies hard rock rarity/reissue, the production is super old school, the A side all big riffs, pounding drums, an epic catchy chorus, and of course some sweet shredding leads, definitely reminiscent of another Valley King artist, recent Record of the Weekers Golden Void, but where Golden Void are more sun baked and laid back, Feral Ohms, are, well, more feral for sure, fierce and snarly, crunchy and fuzzy and blown out, in the red, dense and driving, but catchy like crazy too. The flipside is a little bit more slithery and groovy, but still similarly hard rocking and psychedelic, distorted, a little bit lo-fi and super rocking.
As with all the Valley King singles, super swank silkscreened Alan Forbes artwork, each one hand numbered and signed. Includes a sticker and is LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!!
Andrew Chalk recorded as Ferial Confine for a few years in the mid '80s. At that time, all of those recordings were cassette only releases, mostly self-released / private editions of just a couple of copies with the exception of the Meiosis cassette put out by Broken Flag. That cassette and the Full Use Of Nothing LP, which Fusetron reissued from one of those private edition tapes, found Chalk embracing an acoustic teethgnashing through metallic noise junk. It was no wonder that The New Blockaders and Organum would seek him out as a future collaborator. But there were only hints on those two recordings of what would later become what Chalk would be best known for: the majestic, sublime, and beautiful drone.
Chalk's 1986 album Crescent, which was released under his own name, has long been viewed as the bridge between the Ferial Confine aesthetic of blistered noise and the softened timbral complexities of later work including that of Mirror. That said, nobody had heard First, Second And Third Drop. Also recorded in 1986, this Ferial Confine album truly is the missing link between the two polarities of the Chalk aesthetic, as the scraping metallic skree is present but often tuned in sympathy to bowed gongs and long-thin wire drones. Blossoming reverberation consumes some of these tracks, which sound even better than the classic Organum sound of that time period. It goes without saying that this album is incredible. Well, Andrew Chalk made it, of course. But the historical nature of this record makes it even all the more interesting. Oh yeah, it's also painfully limited; and already sold out at the label.
This is the long lost recording of Andrew Chalk's 1985 album Meiosis, which was originally issued as a cassette on the seminal UK noise imprint Broken Flag. For those of you (and we know there are many of you out there) who are enamored by the impressionistic pools of dreamtime sound that make up most of Chalk's more well known albums, the Ferial Confine aesthetic is a considerable departure. But for those of you who can also sink your teeth into a delicious chunk of noise (and yes there are plenty of you out there too!), this album will hit that teeth-gnashing sweet spot. In the mid '80s, Chalk was not only involved with the Broken Flag circle, but also with Organum and The New Blockaders; and parts of this albums parallels much of the TNB / Organum strategies for densely aggregated, metal-compacted noise junk. Unlike the power electronics sound of Ramleh / Whitehouse, this shared aesthetic sounds like recordings of sheared metal plates being sped up and having the high-pitched frequencies of those scabrous grinds amplified into frenetic transmissions of aggravated tactility. It's almost a more listenable, more psychedelic, more acoustically based form of the aggro-minimalism of the Harsh Wall Noise format which was proposed a couple years back. While this aforementioned sound is the dominant strategy for the first three tracks on Meiosis (following suit from the first Ferial Confine album The Full Use Of Nothing), the middle tracks predict the more contemplative, dark drones that Chalk would produce on his late '80s albums Crescent and East Of The Sun. Here, deep rumbling electronics ripple through delay patterns alongside the resonant acoustic frequencies of suspended pieces of metal and even some field recordings of bird songs. Certainly not the pastoral impressionism of his current output, but very much looking forward to what he would be doing nowadays through a more industrially minded and jackbooted lens. By the end of the album, the searing feedback-blistered frequencies return, albeit with a weirdly psychedelic series of electronic glissandos buried beneath that's akin to early noise-junk Merzbow jamming with Daphne Oram. Very cool. If anything, Meiosis is a fantastic archive from the British underground; and given the collectability (and bootlegs) of the Broken Flag cassettes, this is necessary reissue. Hand fabricated by Andrew Chalk in a tip-on style sleeve with an obi that sports the title in Japanese.
This marks the second reissue of these recordings from Andrew Chalk's early noise-junk project Ferial Confine. The Full Use Of Nothing was originally a cassette self-released back in 1985 and was most likely one of the recordings that piqued the interest of Broken Flag to eventually release some of Chalk's more gnarled constructions. While the Ferial Confine records are definitely noise albums, there is a thread which ties these into the drone-centric work for which he's best known, in the gradual evolution of the compositions that shift from one set of demolished sounds into another. The process seems to find Chalk beginning with metal-bashed percussion recorded at very slow speeds on a 4-track then bounced to a different track at very high speeds with swarming synth / reverb saturated dronescraping draped beneath the volatile squeaking and dissonant klanking aktionism. One can hear some of the early Merzbow and / or Yeast Culture noise-junk recordings and most certainly the frenzied clamour of The New Blockaders (who had in fact worked with Chalk around this same time period), but it's that phasing, slippery drone miasma suspended as a backdrop to all of the tactile noise that gives this a very Andrew Chalk feel. Even working with noise, Andrew Chalk proved himself much better than many of his contemporaries! The cd reissue of The Full Use Of Nothing is the first in a triology of Ferial Confine recordings which will include the Broken Flag cassette Meiosis (1985) and a second pressing of the First, Second, And Third Drop (1986, unreleased until a cd version came out in 2008).
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The first two albums (from 1975 & '76) by this hot-rockin' instrumental Slovak prog/fusion band. Rippin' stuff, with heavy guitar/keys interplay. Complex, flashy, very '70s. If we saw a band like this play today we'd be all "we're not worthy"! (Not new, but we got a couple and wanted to list it, along with the equally awesome Collegium Musicium disc, for the Iron Curtain prog freaks we know populate our mailing list!)
NOW ON VINYL!!!
Another gorgeous missive from the ever expanding world of modern freak folk, this time from Philly based singer, songwriter, guitarist, cellist Margaret Wienk, who with Music For Witches and Alchemists has crafted a darkly dramatic gem of moody mournful melancholia. Equal parts Pentangle, Incredible String Band, and of course some of her more modern sonic compatriots, Brightblack, Vetiver, Espers (Greg Weeks and Meg Baird both play on Music For Witches and Alchemists) and the like, Fern Knight is most definitely modern folk, but at the same time sounds so classic, the songwriting, Wienk's voice, the arrangements, a perfect combination. But the band manage to take that classic sound and infuse it with some sweet sonic mystery, due in no small part to the unlikely instrumentation, the sweet moaning cellos, dreamy swaths of harp, alien melodies on the singing saw, the twang of the Jew's harp, the wheezing harmonium, but unlike most bands, those sounds don't define Fern Knight's sound, merely add to the texture and mood of the music, which even stripped to its bare basics would still sound as sweet.
Fern Knight is not a person's name as we initially thought, it is the moniker for this duo from Rhode Island whose hushed folk pop songs take a number of haunting instrumental twists, turns and detours into atmospheric soundscapes. Heavily reverbed and tremoloed guitars are interwoven with strummed and plucked acoustic guitar as deep somber strings and an occasional accordion wind their way around the unmistakable warm sound of a Fender Rhodes keyboard. So heart-baringly bittersweet and intimate, much like a cross between Julie Doiron and Mirah. Absolutely lovely!
Anyone who scours thriftshops regularly for records will surely be familiar with the names Ferrante and Teicher. World-renowned pop-classicists and dueling pianists from the fifties to the seventies, they're often squarely associated with the Lawrence Welk and Liberace markets our grandparents dallied in. While their recorded output easily tripled the most prolific artist you can imagine, their legacy has pretty much resulted in stacks and stacks of the kind of unwanted records that make crate digging an oft-frustrating chore.
But not everything they did was so square. In the early fifties at the dawn of the hi-fi age, they were among the first composers to take John Cage's prepared piano experiments (a method of altering piano tones by wedging various objects between the strings and hammers) and apply them toward orchestrated melodies. By doing so, and then running the sounds through state-of-the-art, multi-channeled stereophonic recording equipment of the time they were able to create an illusion of multiple instrument sounds such as tympanis, marimbas, xylophones, glockenspiels, and various percussion instruments, all from playing pianos. This reissue of Soundproof and its follow-up Soundblast is the result of such experiments. While this is hardly what we think of as experimental music, it sure does sound amazing. The kind of music you can imagine with Tex Avery cartoons on the moon, or in some space lounge on Venus. Some songs sound like the far-out Afro-Cuban rhythms of Esquivel, other songs have a more impressionistic underwater quality, while others have a more Joe Meek sci-fi surfy vibe. Some tracks experiment with reverse piano and early echo effects. In fact, to create the echo effect, in a time without easy echo electronics, they wired the sound from the piano down to a tiled bathroom a floor below, and placed microphones looped to a delay outside the bathroom door. Out of the two records, Soundproof is more experimental and playful while Soundblast relies on more Latin compositional formulas albeit ones you might hear in danceclubs on Mars. If you come across these Ferrante and Teicher albums in your crate digging adventures, don't dismiss.
A tautology is a statement which is necessarily true because it cannot be used to make a false assertion by virtue of its logical form. Often tautologies involve the needless repetition of a self-evident statement in order to prove that the idea is true; it
His work on "Cycle Des Souvenirs" is something of an extension of the psychosexual narrative found within his "Presque Rien." Here field recordings were taken of European streets, the sea, a train station, wind through a valley, etc. with various fragments of speech whispered just beneath the surface of those judiciously edited recordings. The quiet of these passages are disrupted by clipped drum crashes which explode throughout the sonic landscape, further fragmenting the continuous spoken narrative. The end result is quite evocative, recalling Robert Ashley's masterful "Automatic Writing."
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Luc Ferrari left the reptutable INA-GRM outfit in the early 70s to take his expressive electronic & musique concrete experiments to his own studio. 'Danse Organique' is one of the earliest pieces Ferrari made in his own studio. "This could be a 'strange meeting between two girls and a tape recorder' and is one of his most unorthodox, lively, and sensually charged pieces. Ferrari lent his tape recorder to two girls who are supposed to meet and start a relationship and then builds his imaginary folkloric music around their confidential dialogue... The resulting music has a groovy rhythmic quality in its surreal synthetic development and is outstandingly modern with its similarities to some very unacademic electroacoustic music.
Pay no attention to the liner notes, as the text is ultimately meaningless when attempting to describe this incredible recording by Luc Ferrari. The French musique concrete composer is mostly known for his psychosexual contextualizations that 'telescope' tape manipulated environmental recordings dotted with fleeting whispers of female voices. Symphonic works, pieces with indeterminant scores, radiophonic broadcasts, and theater have all worked within the expansive ouvre of Ferrari; but very little of the work that we had encountered prepared us for what's found on Ephereme. Here are two lengthy pieces recorded in the mid-'70s that look forward to the grim expressionism of the '80s post-industrialists coupled with the drugged-n-droned psychedelia that has been flourishing today!
The first piece is grounded upon a set of low-end synth tones that oscillate and slowly spiral into dissonant harmonic patterns. A stream of disembodied voices emerges from within this grey wash, for a very ghostly shortwave radio feel, with some resemblance to Delia Derbyshire's Dreams or Robert Ashley's Automatic Writing. Along with these voices, a slow churning plod from a downtuned piano furthers the tension of the piece, which gradually dissolves by the end when Ferrari replaces the voices with some lovely Takoma-inspired acoustic guitar playing; and here, the work is really sympathetic to those collages from irr. app. (ext.). Brilliant stuff! The second piece (which clocks in at a whopping 52 minutes) is a much brighter affair, again with synth tones and percolations reflecting the kosmische aesthetic of the day (e.g. Cluster, Tangerine Dream, etc.). Given the extended duration of the piece, all of the revolving sounds are not in any hurry to further their progressions. It's quite enveloping and meditative, somewhat like the droned parts of Natural Snow Buildings or some of the sprawling Emeralds tracks. Again, the acoustic guitar becomes the central focus by the end of this piece. As you could imagine, this sounds nothing like Ferrari's seminal Presque Rien, but it is an amazing document that more than holds its own against anything in his impressive back catalogue. Wow.
The debut release on David "Gastr Del Sol" Grubbs' new Drag City-sponsored label is the cd reissue of this rare LP by French musique concrete artist Ferrari. Apparently such an important work that the label states that "any other record that sounds like this is but a pale imitation."
Self-deprecatingly qualified by Ferrari as a "poor man's concrete music," Presque Rien is a brilliant piece of Spartan tape music that Ferrari began in 1967 with four variations on the Presque Rien theme composed over the next three decades. The first version was originally released in 1970 through Deutsche Grammophon, the next found its way through INA-GRM on vinyl in 1980, the third (composed in 1989) ended up on a cd compendium of the first three Presque Rien suites released through INA-GRM in 1995, and now the fouth chapter (completed in 1998) sees the light of day with the other three version thanks to the Editions Mego subsidized Recollection GRM project. Thus, this complete version makes a hell of lot more sense than the previous INA-GRM version which tacked on a densely claustrophobic and politically charged collage track at the beginning of the disc, setting an entirely different context for how Presque Rein was heard. Each of the four suites operates in a very spacious framework with long passages of placid sounds from nature being ruptured by short aggressive bursts of tape noise, proto-industrial machinations, and psychologically charged fragments of sound. Like Robert Ashley's ultra creepy "Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon", Ferrari intertwines fragments of various whispered narratives with the steady buzzings of choral cicadas, as if each narration were that of a voyeur spying upon the intimacy of nature. It's easy to hear the influence that Ferrari's masterpiece had on a young Steven Stapleton and a pre-pop Jim O'Rourke, as well as pretty much every field recordist / phonographer that picked up a digital recorder... but Ferrari started this way back in 1967. The new 2lp was cut to perfection by D&M at 45rpm. Normally, we'd be all over playing this at the wrong speed, but this is an album really does sound way better at the correct speed. There, it's brilliant.
Smugly qualified by Ferrari as a "poor man's concrete music," "Presque Rien" is a brilliant piece of musique concrete that reflects the turbulent psychological landscape of Paris in the late '60s and early '70s. While the liner notes make no reference to participation in or sympathy with the Parisian rebellion of May 1968, Ferrari's "Music Promenade" (which opens the "Presque
Collection of early recordings from one of the pioneers of Musique Concrete. Includes "Etudes aux Accidents" & "Etudes aux sons Tendus" (from 1958), "Visages V" (1959), "Tete et Queue du Dragon" (1960), "Tautologos 1 & 2" (1961) and "Und so Weiter" (1966).
MPEG Download: "Etudes Aux Accidents" [/audio/ferrarietudesaux.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "Etudes Aux Accidents" [/audio/ferrarietudesaux.m3u]
