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 on "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 70s and set them on the road to being an oldies act. It was the perfect title for 60s 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, August 1st, 2001