Fennesz "Live In Japan" reviews

This CD was one of the albums of the year in The Wire (UK), 2003

em411.com:

Recorded live at Shibuya Nest, Tokyo in February of this year, "Live in Japan" has to be one of the most impressive electronic performances I've ever heard. The Japanese media even said that Austrian artist Christian Fennesz is "one of the finest laptop performers". From this 43 minutes listening experience I must say that it's true.

This continuous set (the album has only one track) blends chopped-up and remixed extracts from his previous album "Endless Summer" and pushes these songs even further in depth and textures. Subtle melodies and samples bring seas of textures from one song to another; Fennesz's pop sensibility is streched and manipulated in improvised noise. The set is clearly improvised as you can easily notice that Fennesz doesn't just "cue" tracks one after the other. The set is slowly constructed, evolving into a moutain of drones, fused into bright and complex layers of noise. After going back into calm melodic moments, the noise brings us to "Shisheido" from Endless Summer before going to the encore.

A vibrant performance that will captivate you from the begining to the end, "Live in Japan" falls under one of the best records (in my book) released in 2003. Classic. Amazing digipak design by Jon Wozencroft.

Chuck Crow:

This album is awesome, so I figured I’d point it out in case you haven’t already heard it. This release has been out for a while - it’s not new, but it’s worth mentioning.

[Just going on raw probabilities, chances are you wouldn’t like Fennesz’s music because he is not photographed in glossy magazines brandishing guns, has not been shot 6 times, and does not star in a crappy movie coming out in which he states, “they can’t lock me up for sellin’ records” (or at least I’m unaware if he is). Nor does he resemble Britney in all her retarded glory.]

So anyway, what do you get when Fennesz essentially remixes his phenomenal “Endless Summer” during a live performance? Well, you get this recording, which took place at Shibuya Nest on Feb 9th, 2003. What’s presented here is one ~45 min piece that meanders all over Endless Summer.

Surely the word “remix” conjures up some DJ Crapola’s cut and paste restructuring of some Depeche Mode song in Garage Band. I use “remix” here to mean the following: Fennesz approaches”Endless Summer” from a conceptually different angle. The final result differs enough to stand on its own two feet. In addition, the album artwork features more of Jon Wozencroft’s amazing photography found on most Touch releases.

Since I’m a very busy and important man, it’s easier for me to copy and paste a summary from forcedexposure.com:

Japanese-only release on the newly developing Headz imprint, in a striking digipak designed by Jon Wozencroft. “Four years after his first performance in Japan in 1999 with Mego, this album is a solo live recording of his latest show in Tokyo. This recording features the full show that took place on February 9, 2003 at Shibuya Nest in Tokyo including the encore, and has been praised by many as the greatest laptop live show in music history. This album is officially approved by the Touch label in the UK, which Fennesz is now signed to. Listen to this mind blowing historical document where you can actually feel a packed club being overwhelmed by Fennesz`s cutting edge and radical pop sensibilities. With his participation on David Sylvian`s album Blemish (Sylvian is featured on Fennesz`s album Venice in return), the amount of international attention that Fennesz is receiving seems to be growing exponentially. His attention is not growing linearly, it’s growing exponentially!! I’m not sure if it is a “mind blowing historical document”, like, say, the Declaration of Independence or Howard Stern’s autobiography, but it’s a great record nevertheless.

The Sound Projector (UK):

Another deliriously enjoyable piece of music from this great electronica ‘superstar’. Last issue the compilation Field Recordings persuaded me that Fennesz was somehow at his best with short, snappy tracks of fizzing sampladelica, and that maybe underneath it all he was a frustrated popstar releasing 2-minute singles of abstract pop-noise, and dreaming of Phil Spector and Brian Wilson production values as he gazed into the one-dimensional portal of his laptop screen. Given that there is apparently a semi-serious ambition to make live pop guitar music with Hazard and Philip Jeck, this perception may not be wide of the mark. However, this live in Japan excursion - one single 40 minute piece - perhaps shows another side to CF, his ambition to replicate the sound and feel of an excessive 1970s progressive rock artist. The music here isn’t that far away from Focus, Tangerine Dream and Bill Nelson (of all people!) all jamming together in some 1970s supergroup of soft-core popular progressive noodling. There’s a lot of acoustic guitar samples here, reminding us of CF’s original chosen instrument, and perhaps hinting at his buried desire to return to frustrated dreams of guitar hero-dom not far removed from the solo excursions of William Nelson and Be-Bop Deluxe. (We should be grateful that Nelson, who has notched up not a few excessive and pointless solo studio recordings in his time, never purchased a laptop - although that luxury item may be on his shopping list as we speak). Fennesz’s guitar work is limited to very basic, simplistic and tasteful chordal strums, which accompany the more familiar layered, filtered, distressed and abstracted slabs of digital noise that are one of his signatures. Here he exhibits more skill than before in applying his filters, effects and treatments, yet the overall sound remains determinedly pleasant to the ear. The last 10-15 minutes of this live work (he usually comes to life at the end of a performance, in my experience) achieve the kind of droning meltdown orgasmic high that most musicians would give their right arm for.

In the end, the complexity of this work (if any) resides mainly in the sound - the sonic treatments which grow increasingly rich, unpredictable and filled with micro-dynamic events that the ear will strain to catch; certainly there is little real complexity in the simple guitar chords which change into simple electronic chords via laptop alchemy, nor in the incredibly basic and utterly linear compositional structures. Hence the progressive rock comparisons, which I feel have a little justification. The mysterious coda at end of CD is extremely good though, and more ‘experimental’ in some way...like an additional 10 minutes of bonus art material. Angular and unpredictable sounds jut out of a strange carcass and give that edge of danger so absent from the proceeding deliriously pleasurable but fundamentally unchallenging preceding 35 minutes. And all this is structured around a rich vibraphone sample that is sheer magic! A co-production between Touch and this Japanese label, this release boasts superior sound quality, Japanese packaging with obi, and Jon Wozencroft sleeve design. All of which is a bit like flying to Japan and seeing a red telephone kiosk in the street in Tokyo. [Ed Pinsent]

Grooves (USA):

While Fennesz fans anxiously await Venice, his follow-up to the justly heralded Endless Summer, they can tide themselves over with this majestic recording of a February 9, 2003 performance at Shibuya Nest in Tokyo. While apparently some listeners have described it as "the greatest laptop live show in music history," music of this potency and textural richness hardly requires such hyperbole to argue in its favour. It begins with a churning, industrial haze of electronics and continues for forty-three raw minutes in a stream-like fashion. While snippets of Plus Forty Seven Degrees 56' 37" Minus Sixteen Degrees 51' 08", Endless Summer, and 'Codeine' (Fennesz's remix of the Ekkehard Ehlers and Stephan Mathieu track from the duo's superb Heroin) do surface, most appear briefly before being sucked back into the volcanic brew Fennesz concocts. Recognizable elements like the melancholy guitar strummings and vibes of Endless Summer and the organ of 'Codeine' are shredded by an astonishing and relentless array of processing treatments. Yet even when such effects are at their most extreme, Fennesz's unique sensibility ensures that melodic traces will be heard straining towards the surface. At the very moment when the sound threatens to become wholly engulfed by static and noise, the familiar strumming of an acoustic guitar breaks through to provide a stabilizing reference. Presumably he used a predetermined 'set list' to guide himself through the performance, but the feel is definitely organic with ideas unfolding in a natural manner. In conjuring this stunning set, Fennesz maintains a level of invention and intensity from beginning to end that is both exhausting and thrilling. The seeming ease with which he shapes these transitions into a cohesive, grand design is masterful. Conspicuous by its singularity is the brief interlude of silence near the end, after which Fennesz ends this remarkable set with the gorgeous 'Caecilia.' [Ron Schepper]

The Wire (UK):

Running parallel to his excursions on the international improvisors' circuit, Christian Fennesz is also developing a career as laptop abstractionist of choice for more orthodox musicians. First he turns up applying texture to David Sylvian's recent return to form, Blemish. Next, he's set to work with Sparklehorse, arguably one of the more openminded outfits to have emerged from the alt Country boom in the mid-90s. Listening to Fennesz's latest solo release, Live In Japan, it's easy to hear why he has become so popular. Essentially, he offers all the puzzles and adventures of experimental music, but with a more assimilable grasp of melody - and a prominent role for the guitar - than most of his Viennese contemporaries. Live in Japan is a new piece, around 40 minutes long, recorded at the Shibuya Nest, Tokyo, this February. The sound, though, will be familiar to fans of Endless Summer, his studio album from 2001: great fields of soft-edged static; rearing symphonic drones; fragments of balmy guitar melody; unsteady digital editing that, at odds with many of his contemporaries, enhances the aesthetic qualities of his music rather than sabotaging them. The last, especially, is critical to Fennesz's appeal. Rather than succumbing to the multiple disruptive possibilities of Improv, Live In Japan evolves serenely from an opening burst of granular noise towards bucolic resolution. As a result, it often recalls a canny update of the bliss-out chapter of avant rock - My Bloody Valentine circa "To Here Knows When", AR Kane, perhaps even The Cocteau Twins - as much as it does to more obvious contemporaries like Pluramon. The result is quite lovely, and oddly radical in the way Fennesz manipulates pop and rock classicism with affection rather than selfconsciousness. Of course, he's not averse to pranks, as the two Fenn O'Berg CDs with Jim O'Rourke and Peter Rehberg testify. But when he revisits the watery vibes and smudged harmonies of "Caecilia" from Endless Summer - which is more reminiscent of The Beach Boys than his cover of their "Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder) - as an encore, what's most striking is the unashamed sentimentality which underpins it. The press release claims the show "has been praised by many as the greatest laptop live show in music history". That's a big call, but it's hard now to imagine one that could be more engaging. [John Mulvey]

Brainwashed (USA):

There are three kinds of human, as you call them. There are the poor doomed huddled masses who are yet to hear Fennesz, cowering in ignorance of the F-able; there are the enlightened who recognise him as a gloriously original experimental musician orbiting spheres way beyond mere progression; then there are total morons who probably waste their time listening to Britpap for lack of any clue whatsoever. The Austrian entity who has totally defined and redefined the interface between overgrown hedge cutting laptop mutation and pick'n'strum guitar beauty played for around forty-six minutes in Japan in the second month of this year. As the summer hit too hot to move, this CD fell into my lucky ol' player on the fifteenth and shimmered with utter perfection. If you didn't dig Endless Summer you are not worth a flick of my fag ash, and I don't even smoke. Chrissy F as his friends almost certainly never call him (I mean have you seen the guy? He looks so serious no one could call him Chrissy F, except maybe that utterly punchable dillweed who tries tosing for Blur) would doubtless not approve of such an irrelevant sentance with parentheses appearing in what is after all supposed to be some kind of description of his latest triumph. Hip Nips (the Jap chaps who clap quiet) hailed the master of cracklepops as the finest laptop performer they had witnessed. Reviewed, it seemed that this was the inevitable hype of the press release, but the disc is ample amplified evidence that this was one sweet shimmer burn of a unique event. Familiar fragments and refrains from Endless Summer are repositioned amongst ever more sundrenched light too bright. Fennesz has shifted his whole unmistakable shtick up a gear here, and made the magnificent Endless Summer seem like a mere rehearsal. If you are one of the enlightened then you know you need this. If you want to elevate beyond the bilge this is the disc to pick, yellow obi 'n' all. Bob Geldof has not been hailing this as the greatest thing he's heard since the Pistols, and Fennesz has never tried to feed the world. How can you tell them it's Xmas time when the summer is endless? [Graeme Rowland]

City Pages (USA):

Like Falco, public health care, and Roberto Benigni's Pinocchio remake, the European phenomenon of the live PowerBook performance hasn't taken very well on American shores. Perhaps in these war-torn times, audiences need a little more shock-and-awe onstage than a guy sitting in front of a laptop can provide. Or maybe the new broken equipment craze that's propelling bands like Wolf Eyes and Nautical Almanac has made it uncool to buy pre-built, unmodified gear. Who knows? All I can say for sure is that at a recent house show here in Minneapolis, New York headliner Chuck Bettis spewed the kind of heart-thrilling noise Merzbow would kill for--and five minutes into his set, there was barely anyone left in the room to hear it. Sure, it was the crowd's loss. But perhaps those deserters afflicted with live-laptop bias should listen to Fennesz's new Live in Japan, which is the most compelling argument for them to shut the fuck up and listen that I've yet to hear. Austrian-based artist Christian Fennesz has already established himself as a preeminent computer musician, meticulously splicing shards of sound and processed guitar into the hazy future-pop of his classic Endless Summer. But where his albums are marked by precise editing and meticulously layered washes of fuzz, Live In Japan captures Fennesz in an improvisational mood, flitting through melodies with the kind of dynamic, turn-on-a-dime shifts that characterize the best that live improv can offer, laptop or otherwise. This shouldn't really be a surprise, since Fennesz regularly takes his PowerBook on the road for solo performances and collaborations with acts like Polwechsel and Fenn O'Berg. Even so, his performance here (presented as a single 43-minute track) is remarkable both in its scope and its consistency: Building up looped melodic phrases into a mass of sound, he then subsumes the whole thing with harsh screeches and crackles. Though the process may sound simple, it takes some skillful manipulation to simultaneously tug those heartstrings and poke them with tiny pins. Each of the several mini-narratives that arises within the set repeatedly pitches melody against noise, order against entropy. The grunting noise that opens the performance slowly unfolds into a pulsing wall of guitar. The hiss of reverberating tape-decayed synthesizers ply themselves against flickering sample-strobes at the 20-minute mark. And at my favorite point in the album, lush organ-drones and finger-picked guitar cap off the first part of the set, variously recalling Ry Cooder, My Bloody Valentine, and early Aphex Twin ambience. There's a marked playfulness throughout the set, as Fennesz drops in teaser samples from his early albums before twisting them into entirely new shapes: It's a knowing wink to the audience, followed by a stealthily concealed middle finger. Toward the last quarter of the record, Fennesz brings things to an emotional pitch, fades entirely to silence, and slowly works back into a splendidly noisy recap of Endless Summer's hauntingly catchy "Caecilia" before fading into quiet fields of pop and crackle. It's a heartbreaking ending that makes a damn good argument for the laptop's rightful place on center stage. And if Fennesz still can't convince the doubters, then it's probably time for the laser light show. [Nick Phillips]

Drowned in Sound (UK):

Christian Fennesz has been ploughing a lonely furrow for quite some time now. I say lonely only because of the stunning uniqueness of his work; while laptop musicians are now a dime a dozen, Fennesz' music transcends the usual pitfalls of such a genre, eschewing technical gimmickry in favour of a distinctly human approach to digital sound. When Fennesz uses a laptop, he does so not to show off his no doubt impressive collection of hardware, nor to create sounds that are deliberately, self-consciously, difficult or abrasive. Instead, he uses the micro-editing possibilites of his technology to expand the emotional pallette afforded him by more traditional instruments. On Fennesz' last original solo release, 2001's Endless Summer, he combined dense, manipulated digital static with calm washes of broken guitar and the occasional stab of warm, breathy organ; it's a fantastic record, certainly one of the best of the recent slew of laptop-based releases, and it achieves its greatness with nary a regular rhythm in sight. Live in Japan, however, goes some way to exceeding the emotionally sharp Endless Summer, protracting that records oscillations to a single, 45 minute ocean of sound. It's impossible to convey just how dense, how thick, this tangle of living, breathing sonic threads really is; in the space of a mere 20 seconds, Fennesz seems to reference Ambient, the radio music of John Cage, his contemporaries, while simultaneously creating a deep sense of space within the fizzes and the crackles. More than anything, Fennesz seems interested in the fallability of technology; his music explodes the innocuous digital sheen that micro-processing is often prone to, allowing error, disassembly, and the odd aural double take to permeate his set. It's quite easy, of course, to forget that this was all conjured during the space of one 45 minute live set in Toyko at the beginning of this year; not one electronic shudder has been tampered with since. It's an incredible achievement, a genuine plethora of sound, fury and fragility, by turns haunting and exultant. Fennesz seems determined to show us the ghost in the machine, and in the process he may well alter our perception of what "experimental" and "popular" music can be. Live In Japan is available by mail-order only at the Touch website.

Pitchfork (USA):

Rating: 8.5
David Berman tosses off an image in his poem "The New Idea" that has been stuck in my head: "beauty blew a fuse." Pulled from the context of the poem, this line gets me thinking about things like Icarus flying too close to the sun or steel driving man John Henry pounding his way through that mountain to his death. It's a line about power, reach, and limitation. I read Berman's words and imagine an aesthetic experience as an electrical impulse carrying so much energy that somewhere, a breaker is tripped, natural limits are exceeded, destruction ensues, and the resulting jumble shows the opposing forces of, well, life. If I had to describe the music Christian Fennesz is making now with a single line, I could do worse than "the sound of beauty blowing a fuse." He started off with other goals. Early Fennesz wound a path through electronic abstraction and then rounded a curve around the time of the "Plays" single that led to his 2001 release Endless Summer. That record was a breakthrough that pointed the way toward a new fusion of guitar melody processed with the limitless textured noise made available via computer. Listening on the bus home from work today Endless Summer sounded even more pop than I remember; once again I was humming the title track, which is actually based on some pretty effective changes. I'm told that on his hard drive Fennesz has a version of his recording of "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)" with Brian Wilson's vocals added on top; someone should write a vocal song to lay over "Endless Summer".

Live in Japan documents a single show recorded in February 2003, and it contains several chopped and processed segments of "Endless Summer", but Fennesz does a lot more here than just cue tracks. Bits of Plus Forty Seven Degrees 56' 37" Minus Sixteen Degrees 51' 08" stream past, there's a remix in there along with some scattered Endless Summer quotes, but Live in Japan is Fennesz in freeform mode, floating from one idea the next and finding the common core of energy in his varied approaches. You really could chart the emotional pitch of this set on a graph, as it begins in the middle, climbs to an early, intense peak, slopes down for some quiet contemplation before starting for another crest. The word "symphonic" comes to mind. Japanese label Headz is billing this particular performance as one of the greatest laptop shows of all time. I am not qualified to address that hyperbole, but I can say that Live in Japan is a very good Fennesz album regardless of how and where it was recorded.

Though the prettier aspects of Fennesz' sound appear with some regularity, Live in Japan generally leans toward noisier territory. It's a thick, heavy mix, and there always seem to be spikes of static bouncing against the floating organ chords and acoustic guitar picking. Fennesz has a way of teasing out unexpected sounds from his gear and creating unusual emotional effects. About 2/3 of the way through his set, he constructs a mountain of drone that sounds like the orchestral sweep of Sigur Ros fused with Merzbow, and then in the shadow of this monolith he inserts a plucked guitar processed to sound like a harpsichord, imparting an odd medieval quality that feels completely unplugged from time. That this towering and heroic mass slowly decays into the comparatively stark and desolate "Coedine," his remix of a track by Ekkehard Ehlers and Stephen Mathieu, is a testament to Fennesz' emotional reach. He wisely concludes his set on this high note and breaks for a moment before plugging back in and working noisier bits of "Endless Summer" back into an encore. Fennesz' approach with previous records has been to explore a small number of discrete sound ideas in each track and then assemble the varied results into an album. A lot of the fun of Live in Japan comes from hearing how he moves from one sequence into something completely different (surely time spent improvising as part of Fenn'o'berg was an influence here.) Live in Japan is mastered as one 45-minute track, and though I've never been crazy about this kind of listener coercion (first foisted upon the world with Prince's Lovesexy), it has forced me to consider Fennesz' set as a whole. This record is a finely rendered laptop suite by a master of dynamics and pacing. There are (too?) many people making similar music on their laptops at this moment, but very few are as accomplished as Christian Fennesz. [Mark Richardson]

VITAL (The Netherlands):

Let's hope that Christian Fennesz doesn't need an introduction. Many of his works are landmarks in the world of laptopmusic, maybe with 'Endless Summer' being the biggest one of them all. Fennesz is also a person who plays live a lot and is among the best ones to improvise freely on his laptop. A live solo album was to be expected. Here it is. It was recorded in Japan, in February of this year and released on the Headz label (run by the same guy that did Meme some years ago, let's hope this label is somewhat better organised), of course with permission of Touch, the UK label to which Fennesz is exclusively signed to. The press blurb raves about the best laptop concert ever given. Maybe that is a bit too much, but I must agree we are dealing with not just a very good recording, but also with some great music. Guitar plays a major part in these recordings, with long passages of untreated guitar playing, to which Fennesz adds little bits of his special layerings of processed guitars. Fennesz has his own style of playing (and I mean laptop here), which is not really about cracks and clicks, but rather psychedelic patterns of sounds, fields, more or less aggressive drones, which are real-time filtered and collaged together. In the encore we even are offered a xylophone and Fennesz comes close to the Beach Boys here. Maybe not the best laptop CD ever made, but certainly for a live CD, one of the best around. (Frans de Waard)

Matiere Brut (France):

Christian Fennesz est de retour avec cette fois, non pas un album mais l'enregistrement complet d'un concert donné le 9 février 2003 à Shibuya Nest dans la ville de Tokyo. Fennesz a une rare aisance à improviser en live ce qui légitime grandement la sortie de ce disque, très emprunt de son album studio Endless Summer sorti en 2001 sur le label Mego. Les guitares "non ou peu traîtées", qui ne cachent pas leurs racines pop, jouent un rôle majeur ici, se reposant sur les fines couches superposées de drones et de clics digitaux manipulés en temps réels. Le tout est comme d'habitude finement mis en place, l'évolution du morceau faisant preuve d'une grande sensibilité. Bref, cet enregistement est une brillante démonstration des possibilités de la "musique laptop" en live. [Yann Hascoet]

Geiger (Denmark):

Christian Fennesz had his big artistic breakthrough in 2001 with the album Endless Summer. The release, that with an extreme fine touch for combining cut-up electronic elements, noise and accoustics, that set new standards for how laptop could be utilized, have since almost obtained something near classical status. Since the release, Fennesz has among other things taken advantage of his popularity, working with an amount of musicians within amost all genres. As from his involvement in the improv trio Fenn O'Berg, with Jim O'Rourke and Peter Rehberg, to AMM's Keith Rowe and at last participates Fennesz on David Sylvian's latest album. According to the rumors, the latest cooperation should be with the american indie-group Sparklehorse. Lately Christian Fennesz has concentrated on finishing the follow-up for Endless Summer - Venice, as the album is called should, according to the rumors contain contributions from David Sylvian and is set for release later this year. Untill then, his growing audience would have to pass the time with this live-album, that has been recorded at his lates concert in Japan the 9th of February this year. In a way, the fact to release a live album, particulary with his already huge level of activity, can seem a bit like an idea, driven more from greediness than artistic will. On the other side, the music on the album actually shows something different. Live in Japan contains one long piece, that constantly supplies elements from pieces from earlier albums, as well as new material. In this way, space for a much more simple and less noisy version of the original accoustic-founded title piece from Endless Summer is given. In all, Fennesz has turned down the more aggressive part of his noise-layering, that has been replaced by as well noisy, but much more fluent background of tiny skips. The more fluent result is at the same time confirmed from that a much bigger part of the music are supported by either small accoustic melodies or wide blurry guitar-feedback layers. In spite that Fennesz few places gives away for small passages with white noise, is the atmosphere he creates on Live in Japan much more restrained and melodious than Endless Summer. The cd seems with it's greater simplicity immediately more easy-listening than one is used to - a fact that without doubt will give Fennesz even more listeners - but without artistical compromises are taken. His music works simply just great under these premisses. Live in Japan works, despite the fact that it is a live album, not just a cd with live-recordings of what Fennesz earlier has produced. On the contrary part the music here gets a much more fluent and organic touch, and the well-known tracks here get new blood with more improvised sequences. That Fennesz with the more improvised pieces gives the music a more free and floating touch, the music adds an extra dimension in relation to his studio albums. Live in Japan is in that way a really well done live album, that on the face of it can be compared with his studio album. Wheter it can bear to stand as an independent work, or if this is just a station between two great studio albums, will Fennesz's next album without doubt reveal. Untill then, Live in Japan will undoubtly give us plenty of vitamins for many listenings. [Translated by Jacob Kirkegaard]

Disquiet (USA):

Laptop Concert in a Tokyo Nest: At a club called Shibuya Nest in Tokyo, Japan, on February 9 of 2003, Christian Fennesz, who records under his last name, took the stage with his laptop and let loose three quarters of an hour of sublimation and noise. The event is now available as full-length CD, Live in Japan, from the Tokyo-based label Headz. Aside from one fadeout half an hour in, it's a single continuous piece of music - continuous, but not homogenous by any means. What is beautiful in a familiar way about the recording (the occasional spurts of guitar, the squawking of birdsong, various lyrical samples) is often muffled by layers of static and fuzz. And that static and fuzz, in turn, is often shaped into its own musical material - repeated, for example, until what sounds like interference becomes a riff; the experience is a bit like seeing enormous and threatening clouds overhead come to resemble faces and forms. (Throughout the record, various segments might be recognized by anyone who has heard Fennesz's previous Endless Summer and Field Recordings albums.) His music thrives on its proximity to chaos, which is what makes it sublime. In contrast with cathartic work that openly embraces chaos, his has the detailed beauty of a carefully produced song, though that song may take several listens to hear, and the production several listens more to appreciate. Almost seven minutes into Live in Japan (the disc contains one single track, 43 minutes in length), after a flurry of fuzz has settled down, an acoustic guitar surfaces tentatively to provide a distinct signal. The digital hubbub subsides, soothed like a pack of digital beasts, rabid robot scouts lured to the campfire by the promise of a lullaby. The hisses and crunches that had previously defined the recording seem to coalesce around the guitar, echoing or otherwise complementing the melody that's being plucked and strummed. There's an extent to which these fluctuations and irritants are welcome, since some of the guitar playing sounds like second-rate singer-songwriter mush. Twenty minutes or so in, as an electric guitar emerges, again it's downright enticing how peculiar particulate sounds - bleeps like terse foghorns, scintillate like amplified fireflies - mesh with the guitar. On first listening, the noise can be little more than a distraction. But Fennesz has the unique ability to suggest an interplay between what is foreground and what is background, and how those two merge into one thick moment is what makes Live in Japan worth sitting through repeatedly. So heat up some sake, dim the lights, and sink in. [Marc Weidenbaum]

(Belgium):

Hij was lang aangekondigd maar het bleef maar wachten op de nieuwe van Christian Fennesz. Eerst zou die in het voorjaar uitkomen, dan in het najaar en dan was er niks. Naar het schijnt is hij nu al in omloop en te beluisteren ergens op het internet en naar het schijnt is hij heel goed. Weten wij veel! Om de leemte op te vullen, was er dan toch die zeer succesvolle samenwerking met ene David Sylvian. Deze Japanse liveregistratie was ook niet mis. ‘Live In Japan’ klonk een stuk agressiever en pittiger dan de studioalbums, die voorafgingen, maar steeds melodieus. Fennesz op zijn best dus! [Peter Wullen]

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