From Sean Cooper Sent Mon, Oct 27th 1997, 06:17
From Sean Cooper Sent Mon, Oct 27th 1997, 06:17
here is a review i wrote for the magazine immerse of the new mego cd, fennesz' _hotel paral.lel_. lord knows if they'll actually print it, but since _paral.lel_'s release is imminant, i thought y'all might get some more immediate use out of it. ----------------------- Fennesz Hotel Paral.lel CD Mego Christian Fennesz is one of the lesser known figures on the Austrian Mego label. An electronic experimentalist with projects including theater, dance, and multimedia, little of Fennesz' compositional output has taken the form of recorded product. _Hotel Paral.lel_ is Fennesz' first full-length release, and joins his also Mego-released "Instrument" 12-inch as his only commercially available music to date. "Instrument," for its part, featured a more or less committed recontextualization of the guitar in the realm of treated electronics and gloriously fractured rhythms. However, Fennesz, as he's expressed it in interviews, is rather tired of being considered a guitarist; although the guitar remains among his primary source points for the sonic manipulations that consititute his compositional method, the processes into which those sourcings enter in concert with the various sampling and waveform manipulation devices which clutter his studio are such that it's really just a matter of habit to keep associating the one with the other. This is more than evident on _Hotel Paral.lel_. A studied instance of relentless reductionism, _Parel.lel_ is concerned with the lower limits of musical sense: how much of a track can be stripped away and still bear witness to something we might call music? This is an abiding interest among a number of contemporary electronic experimentalists--Panasonic, Kirlian, Jim O'Rourke, and labelmates Farmers Manual, among them--but in Fennesz' hands takes on a particularly engaging quality rarely encountered among the techno-minimalists. Of course, few of these tracks are as skeletal as those to be found among the previously mentioned, but _Hotel Paral.lel_ also mangages to achieve its sonic economy at a higher rate of return than typical of minimal electronic music, engaging the listener almost despite itself and often encountering a kind raw beauty all the more astonishing for the forces of chaos that seem to be producing it. A wonderful piece of work. Rating: 8 ----------------- sc onnow: plaid : n43s (warp)