Fennesz and the Meaning of Ambient Music
After a quarter-century of thinking and writing about the Austrian producer’s work, I’ve reached a new understanding of what he’s trying to do.
Whenever I sit down to write about the music of Christian Fennesz, as I’ve now been doing for 25 years, I feel compelled to go back to the beginning. Some of the desire to take in the whole arc of his career has to do with how the environment he emerged from defined his aesthetic—the Austrian producer came on the scene in the late 1990s, when rapidly evolving computing power led to tools that made it possible to turn imagination into sound. He used the tech and his guitar to create a sonic world as unique as a fingerprint—sheets of glitched-out distortion infused with tiny droplets of melody, sawtooth waves buzzing through new-romantic synths. I also look to the long view because of the infrequency of his solo albums, and their disconnect from electronic music more broadly: Though he was on the leading edge of the “laptop music” revolution in the early 2000s, his major works have had little or nothing to do with what’s happening around them for the last 20 years. Rather than seeming out of touch, this disconnect underscores just how deeply personal his work is.
The more time passes, the clearer it becomes that his approach hasn’t really changed. Yes, some albums, like 2001’s Endless Summer and 2004’s Venice, are made up of shorter pieces that have a relationship, however abstract, with pop music. Others, including 2008’s Black Sea and 2019’s Agora, are impossibly widescreen—soundtracks to glacier documentaries of the mind. His latest, Mosaic, which is his eighth solo record and first in five years, doesn’t quite fit into either of those categories. Rather, it suggests that some of these distinctions we (or I) have made along the way have been partly borne of the need for difference, instead of being intrinsic in the music itself. As a critic, I’m always looking for progress, a narrative, something to distinguish why a given record is happening now and not then. But Mosaic shows us that Fennesz’s career has been less about exploration and more about chipping away at an idea of sound that in the beginning lived only in his head.
Early laptop music promised that artists could create unfamiliar sounds that had never been heard before and place them in space wherever they needed to be. Digital audio workstations turned sound into something that could be represented on a screen and manipulated, transforming a time-based art into a non-linear visual form. Unlike standard written notation, computers and editing programs allowed producers to work like visual artists, placing lines and colors and shapes in space. Thirty years into Fennesz’s music career, he now seems like a painter who returns to the same spot to make a landscape and sees something new in it each time.
The hand behind Mosaic is instantly identifiable from the record’s first few notes: “Heliconia” begins with a trill that sounds like a clanging wind chime propelling toward a beach atop an ocean wave. Then a circular chord progression enters, characteristically grand, as if ready to fill a cathedral. It proceeds mightily and evokes the heavens as the chords repeat, and then, halfway through, the drone falls away and we hear the twang of a gentle guitar riff. It brings to mind a probe being sent out into the universe, and seems to come from a place of loneliness, evoking the searching refrain from Pink Floyd’s “Shine on You Crazy Diamond.”
Fennesz has never been interested in ambiguity—there’s an intent behind the placement of each sound, and the specific emotional character of each track is right there on the surface. On “Love and the Framed Insects” a warbly, tape-stretched drone is interrupted by blasts of static, suggesting fear and uncertainty, the feeling at the mercy of forces beyond your control. A gorgeous melody courses through the track, carried by an organ-like synth and then a fuzzed-out guitar, but it never quite resolves, the fabric of the tune unraveling just before the circle is completed. The bed of chords underlying “Personare” brings to mind the eerie beauty of Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti, but it continually slips below the threshold of audibility beneath a layer of buzzing noise. The bass drone of “A Man Outside” seems like it’s rumbling up from a hellish sub-basement as water drips and steam escapes, before bell-like tones transform the air of menace into something like hope.
These are all familiar sounds if you’ve followed his work, but Fennesz has a way of making them new. That might have to do with how his music makes you consider context, where you are and what you’re doing while it all unfolds. Each new Fennesz album requires you to revisit your definition of ambient music, to ask where instrumental electronic music fits into your life and when you want to put it on. It makes me think of an idea the producer Holly Herndon and her creative partner, Mat Dryhurst, had about recorded music in the streaming era—how the value of a piece of music shouldn’t necessarily come from how often you play it.
Fennesz is like that for me: Something I put on once in a while and feel things I know I can’t get from anything else. His music doesn’t work as a soundtrack to another activity because it’s always pushing against you, standing close, crowding you, defying the distance you want to put between yourself and it. Two drone pieces bring Mosaic to a close. “Patterning Heart” is tense and full of life, evoking the wonder of the cosmos, and “Goniorizon” is woozy and disorienting. The guitar, Fennesz’s first instrument, is somewhere in the mix. The vibration of the strings is transformed into electricity, which easily becomes math, and he uses his tools to turn those numbers into the most elemental feelings we’ve got.
