Venice, Text of Light & Grapes from the Estate
by Ian Simmons
[ cdreviews ]
How many different kinds of different are there? Well, judging by this bunch, when it comes to guitar music, an awful lot. All these CDs are based around the use of electric guitars in innovative ways, with enormously different end results. Christian Fennesz has a clearly identifiable sound that changes relatively little from disc to disc, but he manages to do a surprising amount with it. Essentially, Fennesz makes plush, beautifully-produced, multi-layered, slow-moving melodic and elegiac music, with very little else - bar the treated guitar - being significantly in evidence; but having said that, he is excellent at producing evocative variations on this theme. His last album, Endless Summer, harked back to peak-period Brian Wilson Beach Boys and conjured up a sun-kissed Californian idyll out of a relatively minimal fabric.
You cannot get much further from Californian beaches than the quintessentially European decadence of Venice, with its shadows, ennui and sense of mournful loss, self-indulgence and history; yet with pretty much the same sonic palette, Fennesz manages to capture it with equal ease. The album sprawls languidly in a thoroughly Venetian way, and you can almost feel the dark passages, limpid canals and sun-baked, cat-haunted, piazzas. The flow is slightly disrupted by the appearance of David Sylvain on 'Transit', where he produces a more Scott Walker-than-Scott Walker meditation on European decay in a way that only he can; the album never quite recovers momentum. It's not that the remaining tracks are any poorer, but that 'Transit' feels like an album-closer, so the subsequent tracks can't help but appear as afterthoughts. Nonetheless, this is a beautiful and alluring album and a delight to the ear, one for the iPod next time you are on the Bridge of Sighs.
Text of Light take an equally off-beat approach to guitar. A quintessentially New York post-rock supergroup, they were formed to perform improvised soundtracks to the experimental hand-painted films of Stan Brakhage. These are neither soundtracks to the film or musical accompaniments, but are seen by the band as an additional component to a total audio-visual experience. Fronted by the twin guitars of NY stalwarts Lee Ranaldo, from Sonic Youth and Alan Licht. They also incorporate turntablists DJ Olive and Christian Marclay and a jazz rhythm section of William Hooker and Ulrich Kreiger, in various combinations. This is a formidable ensemble and does not disappoint. The music is dense, restless and fascinating, even when presented here without the films that they work with. The three live improvisations presented here stand up extraordinarily well on their own and make for absorbing and rewarding listening, showcasing a collection of musicians completely on top of their craft.
Almost as far as one can get from the roaring feedback-tinged improv of Texts of Light and the high-density sound of Fennesz is Oren Ambarchi's take on the guitar. His sound is ultra-minimal, concentrating on the tonal qualities of single notes, drawn out to lengthy drones and given subtle, carefully-managed decays. The whole album is an exercise in exquisite restraint, with every tone savoured and treated with respect, culminating on the final track 'Stars Aligned, Webs Spun', with its balanced consideration of sonorous, bell-like tones that hang in the air and built to a deep pastoral beauty that sings out the virtues of doing as little as possible, but doing it perfectly.
