Fennesz and Tim Hecker are lazy analogues to use for the music of The Fun Years, but they’re appropriate. The sibilant, gravelly squalls conjured up by the American guitar and electronics duo certainly share a number of traits with their influences, but as displayed on their third Barge LP God was Like, No, The Fun Years introduce a number of components that lead their music in surprise directions, and processing which sculpts novel sonic forms.
‘Little Vapours’ sounds more like fellow Pop Ambient picker Klimek, trebly guitar figures trembling over soothing gusts of ambient breeze. Strings are multi-tracked and delayed into almost Reichian patterns on ‘Breech on the Bowstring’, and slowed to a portentous Godspeed crawl on ‘Makes Sense to Me’. The Hecker influence is more apparent on tracks like ‘Psychic Career’, but with spectral voices leaking through the Turner-esque haze it points to current hauntological fascinations.
In the non-edit of ‘Little Vapours’, the cycling bursts of granular hiss recall moments from Gas’s Pop, streaming bursts of colour beating the ear like warm rain. The 4/4 rhythm introduced on ‘And They Think My Name is Dequan’ would also point to Voigt but for its slipshod acoustic nature, instead coming off like a Northern England marching troupe. By the final ‘Precious Persecution Complex’ it’s as though all these traces have collapsed and solidified, like concrete, audible as a thick grey slab of droning sound, gently exhaling, the final, beautiful breaths of a dying creature.
Joshua Meggitt
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