Experimental Electronic Music
Kin is a record that offers hazy soundscapes, with layers of noise stacked on top of serene melodies, making it almost seem like a series of distant tunes you can’t quite recall. There’s a faint melancholy woven through it, sure—but that’s not what keeps pulling me back. What really hooks me are the songs themselves; track by track, they’re just exceptional.
Mosaic is yet another valid addition to Fennesz’s already spotless catalog. Among the many ambient records I’ve heard this year, Fennesz thankfully reminds us of what ambient music can be when it is done in an original way, rather than offering the usual pulp of clean synth pads with some string arrangements.
Through multiple evolutions along decades, with a refined combination of harmonies, a deep sense of space, a phenomenology of time and bright sonic manipulations based on acoustic timbres, Japanese artists invite the listener to enlightened and intuitive inner promenades.
Venice is an album that continues to work extremely well, even after 20 years. The combination of lighter-sounding loops with sounds that are more distorted results in a complexity of tone and texture as this remastered version emphasizes.
This Viennese slice explores possible worlds contained within computer and guitar, vast reverberant spaces, textural simulacra of the elemental metastasizing through the sound field to immersive […]
Not quite ambient and not quite overt noise with Bécs pointedly asking for your attention rather than quietly seeking it out. Editions Mego serve up […]
Fennesz’ score is likely the most accessible music he has ever written, capturing the nexus of nature and civilization—the sea, the city of Tokyo, the […]
Neo-experimental giants engage in post-digital East-West soundclash summit. Post-synthetic encounters post-digital generation. Big in Japan, Vast in Vienna. Ryuichi Sakamoto, reputation (post-YMO) forged in questing […]
Christian Fennesz works primarily with laptop and guitar and set a new standard for the combination of the two with 2001’s Endless Summer where he […]
