Christian Fennesz has grow to be well-known for a really totally different type of guitar music than he grew up with. However the Austrian glitch icon by no means forgot the sensation of being a child and having your thoughts blown by the proper tune on the proper time: listening to a Deep Purple riff and feeling ten toes tall, perhaps being a little bit older and listening to Pet Sounds and Smile and understanding how pop can be utilized in pursuit of transcendence. He’s lengthy invoked the Seaside Boys as a muse; Infinite Summer time, his 2001 masterpiece, shares its identify with the band’s 1974 greatest-hits comp, and its wounding chord adjustments and symphonic grandeur dovetailed with a Y2K-era second when hipsters had been discovering Brian Wilson and Burt Bacharach and an arranger was abruptly the sexiest factor to be.
That best of starry-eyed genius is much less trendy now than when Fennesz started his profession, and Fennesz’s personal strategy has developed to grow to be extra workmanlike. His eighth album, Mosaic, is the results of a course of he describes as a “9 to five,” a gradual working ritual that entails a dedicated day by day apply adopted by lengthy hours of modifying. This course of additionally resulted in 2019’s Agora, a spotlight of his profession that located his plain ear for concord in a extra stripped-back context. These six tracks simmer his sound down even additional, and although his instrument is often unrecognizable, Mosaic is the closest factor to a “guitar album” he’s put out since 2008’s Black Sea. It feels performed, not organized.
The slides and sweeps that outline Fennesz’s sound have at all times given away their supply, even when his results burble like a thousand voices. On Mosaic, you may hear the guitarist’s bodily labor extra clearly than ever. The solemn downstrokes on “Heliconia” sound like they had been recorded by means of a tin-can phone, however they nonetheless land with the heroic drive of a heavy rock energy chord. The astonishing swells on the finish of “Patterning Coronary heart” sound as very like a church bell as an ’80s post-punk try at imitating a church bell—perhaps an remoted observe from The Unforgettable Hearth or Disintegration. The pneumatic ribbons of guitar on “Personare” sound like air slowly being set free of a balloon, however anybody with a shred of familiarity with how the instrument works can image the precise movement up the neck required to make the sound.
