Fennesz - Bécs

Many years after Endless Summer, his much loved 2001 album, Christian Fennesz has taken a trip back to the balmy 2000s. Bécs, his first new work since Black Sea six years ago, is a major mood shift and an explicit sequel to Endless Summer. But going back is not always the easy, or the sensible option, so what exactly is Fennesz up to?

The answer is not entirely clear. Fennesz uses guitar samples to build highly atmospheric layers, creating space by combining ambient, minimal and soundtrack electronic sounds. Endless Summer was music for mosquito-ridden beaches and smouldering campfires, melancholy with occasional forays into euphoria. Subsequent work took him into darker, more dissonant territory on Venice and Black Sea, as well as multiple collaborations with the electronic illuminati.

The title Bécs, the Hungarian name for Vienna where Fennesz is based, hints at an underside, a lost alter ego. The feel of the album, though, is far more upbeat and produced that recent work, or indeed Endless Summer. The first track, ‘Static Kings’, uses the same bending, chiming guitar found on Underworld tracks. This is something of a concern, stadium electro not being the most subtle or rewarding of genres. The promised static is not really in evidence either, and the cheerful, Orbital melody seems inconsequential and dated. However, the mood shift rapidly on ‘The Liar’, which serves up heavy, pulsing, waves of guitar fuzz, returning rapidly to the abstraction Fennesz does best.

At the centre of Bécs is ‘Liminality’, which packs a proper punch. It features a ponderous, detuned guitar riff and drums from Tony Buck contending with a wall of static, pulling the track through ten minutes of storm and aftermath, a confident piece of electronic theatre. ‘Pallas Athene’, named after the Greek goddess of wisdom and civilised attributes in general, is an oasis of pastoral calm with an organ chord over a single bowed string, or its synthesised equivalent. The title track is a cousin of ‘Liminality’, guitar and static building atmosphere, while ‘Sav’ features some delightful, crackling and buzzing from the modular synthesiser of Cédric Stevens, aka Acid Kirk. The final track, ‘Paroles’, has a similarly sunny mood to ‘Static Kings’ but is far more successful, combining a sense of humour (squeaky synths) with a gentle tune and a minor key.

The overall effect of Bécs is a little puzzling. In some places it feels like a retreat from the increasing subtlety and minimalism of Fennesz’s more recent albums, which were beautiful in their understatement and compelling because they had their own particular logic, independent of the music around them. Where Bécs heads into more conventional territory it sounds dated. Where it plays down the extensive production that has gone to make its sounds, it is a much more enthralling listen. The rewards from returning to the past are mixed, but there is enough hear to make it a qualified success.

Bécs is available from iTunes here.