Christian Fennesz has become famous for a very different kind of guitar music than he grew up with. But the Austrian glitch icon never forgot the feeling of being a kid and having your mind blown by the right song at the right time: hearing a Deep Purple riff and feeling ten feet tall, maybe being a little older and hearing Pet Sounds and Smile and understanding how pop can be used in pursuit of transcendence. He’s long invoked the Beach Boys as a muse; Endless Summer, his 2001 masterpiece, shares its name with the band’s 1974 greatest-hits comp, and its wounding chord changes and symphonic grandeur dovetailed with a Y2K-era moment when hipsters were discovering Brian Wilson and Burt Bacharach and an arranger was suddenly the sexiest thing to be.
That ideal of starry-eyed genius is less fashionable now than when Fennesz began his career, and Fennesz’s own approach has evolved to become more workmanlike. His eighth album, Mosaic, is the result of a process he describes as a “9 to 5,” a steady working ritual that entails a committed daily practice followed by long hours of editing. This process also resulted in 2019’s Agora, a highlight of his career that situated his undeniable ear for harmony in a more stripped-back context. These six tracks simmer his sound down even further, and though his instrument is usually unrecognizable, Mosaic is the closest thing to a “guitar album” he’s put out since 2008’s Black Sea. It feels played, not arranged.
The slides and sweeps that define Fennesz’s sound have always given away their source, even when his effects burble like a thousand voices. On Mosaic, you can hear the guitarist’s physical labor more clearly than ever. The solemn downstrokes on “Heliconia” sound like they were recorded through a tin-can telephone, but they still land with the heroic force of a heavy rock power chord. The astonishing swells at the end of “Patterning Heart” sound as much like a church bell as an ’80s post-punk attempt at imitating a church bell—maybe an isolated track from The Unforgettable Fire or Disintegration. The pneumatic ribbons of guitar on “Personare” sound like air slowly being let out of a balloon, but anyone with a shred of familiarity with how the instrument works can picture the exact motion up the neck required to make the sound.
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