fennesz

Listening to Fennesz right now on a stormy Saturday afternoon in NYC. Christian Fennesz is an Austrian composer that works with just guitar and computer. I'm listening to Field Recordings: 1995-2002, but apparently I have four other albums of his, and a few extra with collaborators. This is one of those albums that I stumble across when I'm bored, stuck at home on a rainy day, and just scrolling through my 200 gigs of music. I have an extended debate going with DC about whether it pays to keep so much music. He's got around 80 gigs, keeping that lean & mean, deleting stuff he knows he won't listen to much or he doesn't like (or refuses to check out). I, on the other hand, try to acquire as much music as possible (I want every Miles Davis album, with abundant space on external hard drives, why not?). I see his point: I sometimes forget something good I like and wind up keeping a lot of stuff I don't listen to that tends to muddle my collection. But then I stumble across something like Fennesz and I'm glad that I err on the side of abundance.

This stuff is really unbelievable. Some of it sounds like Boards of Canada, or even Jan Jelinek, but it is often more intense: laser-beam guitar sounds slashing through walls of ambient sound, a dark beat coming in and out, completely cinematic. He has some tracks with strings, or deep keyboard sounds that sound like contemporary classical composers like John Cage, or maybe Charles Ives and Shostakovich. 

I wanted to post an Mp3 but I couldn't figure out how to do it (maybe someone can post how that's done, if it's easy?).