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.
