Press play and within seconds Austrian electronic artist Christian Fennesz gently ushers you you into his highly immersive musical world. It’s always been this way. He’s one of the few wholly unique innovators in electronic music, who is able to create intensely emotional music whilst retaining a highly experimental and at times quite non musical edge. His debut Hotel Para.lel (Mego) appeared in 1997 and over the course of four studio albums proper, live albums and collaborations with the likes of Ryuichi Sakamoto, he has continued to create powerful and highly immersive soundscapes seemingly a world ahead of his contemporaries. His name has become a signifier of class, a highly rigorous approach to working with sound and the result is an unsurpassed quality of output. Black Sea only enhances this, even though it lacks the kind of thematic unity that made 2001’s Endless Summer (Mego) such a revelation.
The amount of ideas at play on Black Sea are mind boggling. Warm pads of static and dreamy swirls of digitalia meet in these highly textured walls of sound. Occasionally you will hear the strum of guitar amongst the warm rumblings however this music isn’t about the riff, or possibly isn’t even about music. To Fennesz the guitar seems to be a vague reference point, which he can touch upon, tap into an emotion and then move forwards. Structural changes occur from evolving atmospheres, textures are more important than notes, the guitar fades in and out, purposely buried and then retrieved from up to its neck in static, as do other slices of conventional instrumentation which coagulate with the more synthetic material. Fennesz is the thinking man’s atmospherist, gently paced with repetitive waves of textured ambient sound similar to slow cyclical Sun 0))) type riffing except that it’s made up of random digitalia and messy swirls of sound. He collaborates with the highly percussive vaguely eastern sounds of Anthony Pateras’ prepared piano on The Colour of Three and also utilises a live performance with Rosy Parlane as a starting point on Glide, a gorgeous shimmering work of almost orchestral sheen that may be his best work to date and almost recalls post rock. That’s if sound art could ever be post rock. This album is typically remarkable. Almost by coincidence at the end you realise the amount of barriers that have been broken here, noise, ambient, experimental, sound art, pop have all been unified into this one gorgeous Fennesz soup.
Bob Baker Fish
