CD – Ash / Touch
It is always difficult to begin discussing new releases by Christian Fennesz. Maybe this is due to the size of his personality, or perhaps it is the complex aesthetics of his compositions, which often center on very elegant and harmonious ambient-drones. His more recent works almost completely lack the glitch connotations that were once crucial in the rise of the artist in contemporary international music in the mid-nineties. AUN / The Beginning And End Of All Things was actually meant to be the soundtrack to the film of the same name by director Edgar Honetschläger, a narration concerning alternative energy sources and a prophecy from an ecological perspective. As a result, a very muffled approach springs up: elegiac, quietist, with reverberations in limitless spaces and positive feelings. More digital melodies and intonations meticulously alternate with moments of surreal inspiration. It is not unintentional that three of the tracks included in the album have previously appeared in Cendre, a seminal project featuring Ryuichi Sakamoto, another experimenter who made a certain romantic melancholy the key to his success. Most of the fifteen tracks do not exceed three minutes, though they are still able to engage the listener thanks to their expansive character, enlarged by a minimalist yet prevailingly melodic tone, refrained but always highly refined. An acoustic guitar or a weak electronic, lost in very dilated and assonant textures, in the leaps and the digital swallows, is still able to fascinate us, as we lose ourselves in the curls of a very dreamlike narration.