Christian Fennesz's 2001 album Endless Summer was a go-to album of electronic music for people who don’t necessarily listen to a lot of electronic music. For his new record, Fennesz has returned to both the label and the style that provided that breakthrough.
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It’s probably difficult to imagine if you weren’t there, but Endless Summer, the 2001 album by Christian Fennesz on the Mego label, seemed like a pretty big deal at the time. I’m not positive it was a big deal because back then it wasn’t so easy to measure these things; you couldn’t add up YouTube plays or look on the Hype Machine or measure Facebook Likes to see how music was getting around. Instead, you pretty much had to rely on the conversations you were having and the reactions you were seeing among those people. And Endless Summer, an album of abstract but pretty electronic music on a label better known for releasing abstract and—well, if not ugly, then at least difficult electronic music—seemed to get around. It became the template for a type of record that has become familiar: the go-to album of electronic music for people who don’t necessarily listen to a lot of electronic music.
In the years since, Fennesz has made a lot of records (and he even reissued Endless Summer), but he’s only released two proper full-lengths that weren’t either collaborations or created to soundtrack another medium. Both 2004’s Venice and 2008’s Black Sea were quintessential Fennesz—heavily processed guitar, quaking drones, shoegaze-informed clouds of distortion—but they took his sound in darker directions with increased density. While the records expanded Fennesz’s sound in intriguing and satisfying ways, they never had that lightning-in-a-bottle moment of Endless Summer. It was a new millennium and we were just starting to understand the ability of using a laptop computer to make music sound new, and here was a record that took the wistful sounds of the California dream and refracted them through silicon. It was the sound of a moment.
For his new record, Fennesz has returned to both the label and the style that provided that 2001 breakthrough. Even if Bécs hadn’t been positioned as an Endless Summer sequel, the connection to the earlier work would have been clear. Rather than serving as texture, the strummed guitars play changes to accompany melodies. The drones and fractured processing are twinkly and bright, instead of dour and foreboding. Once again, Fennesz proves a master of this approach. The acoustic strumming in “Static Kings” sounds impossibly delicate and naïve next to the swirly vortex of the drone accompanying it; the deep organ pedals of “Pallas Athene” bring to mind a vast expanse that stretches to the horizon; the harshness of the distortion on the title track walks a tightrope between oceanic envelopment and repellant destruction. The closing “Paroles” brings it back full circle with possibly the most naked acoustic playing to appear on a Fennesz record, as processing seems to cling to random notes like a burr before being flicked off with the next note. The sense of composition and sound design is strong, and these tracks complement each other and make a coherent whole even if no two sound the same.
The relative warmth and light here gives the music a nostalgic cast, which was at the heart of what made Endless Summer so memorable, but Bécs also possesses an added layer that doesn’t necessarily work in its favor. Fennesz once illuminated the beauty of a digitally scrambled memory, but Bécs is a memory of a digitally scrambled memory. So while there’s something appealingly meta about returning to a sound that was so suggestive of experimental electronic music 13 years ago, there’s also just the slightest hint of surrender in the proposition. If electronic music in this vein is generally expected to push things forward, resurrecting a style from over a decade ago makes you wonder about motivation. But that’s an analytical judgement rather than an aesthetic one, because the music on Bécs is often gorgeous.