Fennesz
Endless Summer
[Mego]
Rating: 9.4
All last week I had a Fennesz song in my head. If this doesn't strike you as
an odd statement, you've probably never heard his previous full-length Plus
Forty Seven Degrees 56' 37" Minus Sixteen Degrees 51' 08". It was a
brilliant album, packed with dense, complex and immersive sound. But it was,
shall we say, abrasive. And if you ever found the tracks from Plus Forty
Seven Degrees running through your head for days on end, you'd probably
try to silence them with drinking binges and eventually find yourself curled
up in a doorway, a casualty of our crumbling mental health system.
That album was noise music, my friends. But this song running through my head
last week, it was pretty, and I could hum it. It opened with a bit of strummed
acoustic guitar (Fennesz has always fed his guitar into his laptop, but this
is the first time I'd heard him play it straight) and gurgling electronics
not far from Dots and Loops-era Stereolab. The chord changes were
clear and effective, and the yearning synthesizer outlined a melody that
tugged at the heartstrings. There was noise to provide contrast to the warmth,
enough to strike the perfect balance. The song I couldn't get out of my head
was the title track from Endless Summer, an album that finds Austrian
Christian Fennesz seeding his clouds of distortion with radiant chunks of
melody. And the rain, she is beautiful.
I'm sure you've all heard of a festival that started in San Francisco called
Noise Pop. I like seeing those two words together, as their confluence gets
to the heart of what I love in music. The Jesus & Mary Chain, My Bloody
Valentine, the Flaming Lips-- at various times, all these bands lacerated
melody with distortion, thereby making it so much more striking. I don't
hesitate to lump this Fennesz album into that category, though he's coming
at the intersection from the noisy part of town (buyer beware). If the Beach
Boys represent the ideal of angelic clarity at the near end, and white noise
is the sonic chaos in the distance, Fennesz currently owns the territory
about 2/3 the way down the scale.
"Made in Hongkong" opens Endless Summer with electric guitar chords
in a descending progression that are swirled together as though heard
through an aural kaleidoscope. In a similar vein is "Caecilia," with
ringing vibes set against the quavering, distorted guitar lead, altogether
sounding something like a laptop version of a calliope waltz. "Shisheido"
is even more conventional, consisting of a strummed electric guitar that's
sporadically smothered in extreme high-pass filtering and a simple keyboard
melody.
"A Year in a Minute" is one of a handful of tracks that approaches the massive
drones of earlier Fennesz, but it, too, captures the warmth of the theme. Fat
organ pipes of distortion move in a three-chord pattern, building in intensity
and changing slightly in texture, eventually giving way to jittery electronics.
Also coarse is "Got to Move On" which hides its melody far behind a buzzing
electrified fence of sound.
Obviously, my choice of the Beach Boys for the earlier metaphor was deliberate.
One side of his two-song seven-inch, Plays, found Fennesz kinda
covering "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)." I say "kinda" because
I can't hear any direct reference to the original, though I do think Fennesz
captured some kind of essence with his version. Fennesz gets more overt with
this trickery with "Before I Leave" which samples the familiar organ sound of
the Beach Boys (so loved by Sean O'Hagan) and gives it the Oval treatment,
creating a track of rapidly skipping tones.
This appropriation says something about the feeling of this record. We all
remember Endless Summer as the Beach Boys album that brought them
back to prominence in the 70's and set them on the road to being an oldies
act. It was the perfect title for 60's California nostalgia, and it's the
perfect title for this Austrian's fractured take on some of the same
signifiers.
The cover of Fennesz' Endless Summer features placid beach scenes
right off an Ocean Pacific t-shirt, complete with warm sunset colors.
Tellingly, the pictures are obscured by video scanlines, revealing this
experience as a third-generation dub of the original media-derived memories,
which, of course, came from Beach Boys songs and beach movies. But the
importance of California and the Endless Summer never needed to be grounded
in reality; as the old saw goes, Brian Wilson's California was a state of
mind. And Fennesz takes musical warmth, glowing melodies and lush
arrangement and subjects them to sharp digital decay, providing another
deep layer of meaning.
-Mark Richard-San