Il Libro Mio 3

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Christian Fennesz should be nothing short of a godsend for anyone who has given up on the electric guitar as a dreaded vestige of Rock. Theres life in that old warhorse yet! Like MAIN's Robert Hampson, Austria's Fennesz finds genuine new potential for wood and wire through extremely clever techniques of sampling and digital reconstruction. Ghosts of familiar guitar shapes are still discernible within Fennesz's music whether as explicitly as the strummed acoustic chords and looped melodic motifs of "Tor" or implicitly, like the amp noise after-images and feedback grain of "P" to those willing to listen for them. That touch of the familiar makes all the difference, contextualizing the electroacoustic detonations, disruptions and effervescence that might have otherwise settled as a gray, nondescript and ultimately uninteresting concrete coagulum. "Il Libro Mio Recherchen Zum Manierismus," composed to be performed live for a 1998 choreography by Tanz*Hotel founder Bert Gstettner, is quintessential Fennsez. As is the case with the astonishing Rolling Stones and Beach Boys re-inventions on his recent "Fennesz Plays" seven-inch (Mego), you can listen to each of the four brief sections which comprise the 20:01 environment of "Il Libro Mio" and never hear anything remotely similar twice. Taken as a single piece, a strong sense of composition materializes, with enough self-referential ingenuity in Fenneszs arrangement of acousmatic elements to make this music concrete with a distinct and compelling leitmotif. It must have been well suited to Gstettner's balletic ode to 16th Century Florentine painter/poet Pontormo - self-described as a "dance in suspension, distorted, assembled, mannered of demi-angels, flaming hearts and counter-organic movement studies." Gstettner couldn't have found a more ideal composer than Fennesz. The young Austrian musician continues to soar from strength to strength with his explorations of these exact themes; and he can now add the accolades for a bravura example of modern composition to a hat already well-feathered from his ventures within the Rock (Maische), electronic (Fennesz), jazz (Orchester 33 1/3) and improvisation (Fen-O-Berg) communities.