Whatever Christian Fennesz does, it always comes down to recalibrating the relationship between guitar and laptop: how much or how little should the sound be manipulated, and to what extent should the guitar still sound like a guitar? It was this way on his glitchy masterpiece Endless Summer (2001), where the Viennese musician threw open the doors to contemporary experimental music, and again 13 years later on Mahler Remixed, his reworkings of recordings by Austrian composer Gustav Mahler.
Some tracks on his eighth Mosaic album recall the sonic density of those Mahler remixes, as Fennesz layers sound upon sound. On others, like »Personare«, he becomes more concrete: fuzz guitars are cloaked in a haze of ambience and treated with effects from the echo chambers of dub techno. Even in the darkest of experiments, Fennesz manages to create a kind of beauty in sound. Throughout, the album radiates a bittersweet melancholy – on »Love And The Framed Insects« so strongly that you almost want to give Fennesz a hug.
Mosaic
