A small nation suspended between memories and the future. Between ancient glories, a pale recent past and, now, a renewed adherence to what was the role of center of gravity between Europe and the East. These are the moods that can be felt in modern Austria and, in a certain sense, are at the base of the soundscapes that mark the works of Christian Fennesz, today one of the most representative artists of IDM and electronics. In the creations of the Austrian musician we perceive a fruitful encounter between old and new, between analog and digital, the use of the guitar and the computer to create shimmering electronic sounds and complex musicality, all marked by an unmistakable spleen that seems inherited from Central European literary production. The guitar, always present even if lost in a subtle plot, seems to detach itself from its physical limitations to give shape to a new and bold musical language that increasingly projects itself towards the encounter with images, those of the mind and the “real” ones of silent films and installations by video-makers as it did with The Man Who Laughs at the Louvre in Paris or Berlin: Die Symphonie der Großstadt by Walter Ruttmann. Born musically with the Maische formation, Fennesz soon begins to explore the territories of electronics on his own, first with the glitch of Hotel Paral.el (1997) then with the greater abstractions of Plus Forty Seven Degrees 56’ 37” Minus Sixteen Degrees 51’ 08” where the sound of the guitar recalls the sound saturations of My Bloody Valentine; finally his landscapes become a place for the return to more human emotions and sounds even if often broken and interspersed with barriers of noise. With Endless Summer (2001) we are faced with solid melodies, at times dialoguing with pop, capable of taking the listener into real valleys of digital sound while in Venice (2004) the musical landscape is that of the lagoon city, of a drumming rain, of the lapping of the sea, always barely hinted at, which mix with the more instrumental sounds, with cascades of rustling, noises, drones. The musical sensitivity of the Viennese artist led him, starting from the nineties, also to undertake collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto, with Kevin Rowe, icon of electroacoustic improvisation, with Peter Rehber and Jim O’Rourke and with Sparklehorse. A network of relationships that culminates in the meetings with Mike Patton and with David Sylvian, ex Japan.
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City
Walter Ruttmann, Germany 1927
From dawn to the late evening light, an enveloping immersion in the life and rhythm of a metropolis. The daily breath of Berlin is admirably photographed, dissected and reassembled according to the suggestions of the montage theories of the great Dziga Vertov. Between factories, shops, sidewalks and theaters, the life of Berlin is reduced to "pure arabesques of movement". "Ever since I began to work in the cinema", declared Ruttmann, "I always thought of doing something with living material, of creating a symphonic film with the thousands of energies that make up the life of a great city". He shot it and the film became a masterpiece in the history of cinema.
