Christian Fennesz is an Austrian guitarist and laptop musician. His beginnings as a musician are rooted in playing guitar and singing in the Austrian underground avant-rock group Maische. Active from 1988 to 1992, the band released two exceptionally odd rock records: In Gold and Brand. After the disbanding of Maische, Fennesz felt that he had hit a stylistic limitation with his guitar playing.

“I had gotten to the point where I could play the guitar really well—really fast solos, for instance […]. It really took me a while to get rid of all this because the guitar became a monster cliché. That’s why I completely abandoned it for a while and just worked on the laptop for a few years when I played live. But then I came back because I missed some of the things about it. I came back to the guitar, but play it extremely simply.”

Fennesz intentionally abandoned the guitar for a while to unlearn the clichés he felt had trapped him. He began to create music using at first just a laptop (the album Plus forty seven degrees 56′ 37″ minus sixteen degrees 51′ 08”, and the single “Plays”), and then easing the guitar back into the forefront of his music bit by bit (Hotel Paral.lel). “Plays” includes heavily modified covers of the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” and the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Talk (put your head on my shoulder).” These two covers hear nothing like the original songs, which have been distorted to the point of unrecognizability. The stunning Endless Summer (Mego 2001), his most popular work – an album constructed of guitar and laptop manipulation – combines this kind of sonic trickery with the melodic sensibilities of Hotel Paral.lel and the white noise washes of Plus forty seven, anticipating much of his later work. The album’s title comes from a Beach Boys compilation of the same name; drawing influence from their music, the album deconstructs and reconstructs the melancholy melodic sensibilities of a beach bum’s playlist, creating an entirely new perspective on electronic music itself. It has to be heard to be believed, and is probably the best starting point for understanding Fennesz’s work.

In 2011, to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Gustav Mahler’s passing, Christoph Thun Hohenstein of the Viennese creative promotion agency Departure commissioned a remix of Mahler’s symphonies from Fennesz. According to Fennesz’s manager Danilo Pellegrinelli, this was the second time that Hohenstein had asked Fennesz to remix Mahler’s music, the first time having been in 2001, when he was head of the Austrian Culture Forum in New York. Since it was never recorded, there is little to be said about this first remix, but in an interview, Fennesz mentioned that it was far more on the noisy side of things, and that he felt it was no longer in tune with his current ways of thinking.

Ich habe die Sachen von 2002 durchgehört. Die waren zwar gut, aber ich fand sie nicht mehr zeitgemäß. Die Herangehensweise, die ich damals hatte war noch stark im Glitch-Umfeld verhaftet, und das ist mir jetzt eben nicht mehr so nahe. Einige Sachen konnte ich schon noch verwenden, aber ich musste es ziemlich überarbeiten.

I listened to the pieces from 2002. They were good, but I found them to be no longer up to date. The approach that I had then was still strongly glitch-oriented, and that doesn’t feel so close to what I do anymore. Some things I could still salvage, but I had to rework it quite a bit.

This may explain why the piece was performed, but never recorded. The 2011 remix was performed live three times: at the Vienna Radiokulturhaus; at Carnegie Hall in New York City; and at The Borusan Art Centre in Istanbul. The Vienna Radiokulturhaus performance was recorded in May 2011 and released in 2014.

Mahler Remixed is divided into four movements ranging from ten to nineteen minutes in length. Part one begins with a languid drone of strings and distant brass, seemingly frozen in time, a sound like waves crashing in slow motion. It is difficult to tell what of Mahler’s work is being used, or to describe how it is being manipulated. For the first seven minutes, this ebb and flow continues, with bits and pieces of digital clatter poking in and out of the ethereal ocean of sound. The sea subsides, and is followed by the distinct statement of the opening theme from the third movement Scherzo from Mahler’s Seventh Symphony (but greatly slowed down): a dark and ominous interlude of brass, strings, distant booming drums, and clipping distortion produced by overloading the audio signal of the samples. This is quickly replaced by a rising layered and cycling drone of strings tinged with brass on the horizon: this time, with a mood of triumph – a moment of excited anticipation, stretched out into infinity. Right before the ten-minute mark, from under the sea of orchestral reverb, comes a towering proclamatory brass crescendo that lasts for but a short moment, and is then swallowed up, repeating several times at lesser volume. Again and again, throughout Mahler Remixed, one segment of the performance is engulfed by the next. There are no sudden changes or hard turns, everything happens in slow motion. Layers of samples and distortion are added on continually, then Fennesz adds his guitar, letting feedback squeal and strumming chords wane in accompaniment. The massive swirl of guitar and samples builds and builds, finally collapsing into itself, leaving a buzzing oscillating synthesizer melody in its wake. Interestingly enough, as the first movement concludes with this synth line, off in the distance one again faintly hears the crescendo that was sampled right before the ten minute mark. With that, part one draws to a close, and there is silence for the first time.

Part two floats in with a mournful set of vocal tones and more digital clatter, sounding like a shattering of china, dispersing into tiny grains of sonic glass. As in part one, the Mahler samples slowly build into a vortex of sound, with prominent strings and vocals, a glowing buzzing aura of distortion wrapped around it, getting louder, until around the seven minute mark it reaches an apex of saturation. There the vortex subsides as samples are stripped away, one by one, until there is silence, save for a low bass rumble. This is followed by a complete solo guitar piece called “Liminality” – an original song found on Fennesz’s album Bécs. “Liminality” has a pop-like chord progression, with an air of wistfulness and sentimentality which complements the elegiac atmosphere of the Mahler segments.

Part three begins with troubled-sounding horn sections, skipping and popping, and then just a pulse of white noise and low-end hum. This ends when layered samples of woodwinds bring a sense of calm, eventually turning into a four-note looping oscillation. The loop subsides into silence, which is broken by a harsh array of noise, crackling until a distant-sounding orchestra plays, grand chords resounding in an infinitely resonating space. The sonic space that this performance takes place in is difficult to describe, indeed the reverb seems to stretch on forever, but never clouds the fine details of the pieces; like a cathedral in the sky. Part three never does reach a massive discrete peak like parts one and two, staying constantly languid and melancholy. The orchestra then fades away bit by bit as part three ends.

Part four starts with a warm drone of strings, brass, and vocals. Mixed in is a static hiss, sounding a bit like rushing water. After two minutes, a guitar rings through. In a similar way to “Liminality” it makes use of a simple riff built on pop chords, and a feeling of heavy sentimentality. The combination of washed-out guitar, hissing white noise, strings, and choir is sheer bliss, the white noise playing tricks on the ear, making the music sound like it is taking place next to a waterfall. The guitar coda repeats itself, slowly becoming more distant and washed-out, until all that remains is hissing and a pleasant organ-like drone, and part four fades out.

Fennesz’s music is often described as glitch music that borrows from genres such as shoegaze, ambient, noise, pop and classical music. The dictionary definition of a glitch is a temporary malfunction. The term glitch is applied to many different kinds of digital malfunction: radio interference, a computer freezing, a video game behaving oddly. Sonic glitches are “failures” in sounds: for example, a CD skipping, or surface noise on a vinyl record. Glitch music is music that incorporates sonic failures such as intentional distortion, white noise, hisses, crackles, pops, or skips. The genre has no essential identity, but it serves as a prism for other genres of music to pass through. Electronic music, pop music, noise music, even speed metal have been fed through the meatgrinder of the glitch aesthetic. Glitch can be described as “post-digital,” meaning that the digital revolution has passed, and that the next step is to deconstruct the ideals of digital sound by damaging and manipulating audio. There are many ways to damage, deconstruct, and manipulate digital audio. One approach is the physical manipulation of a digital source. The early glitch pioneers Oval, a German electronic music group founded in 1991, were known to write over and generally mutilate the bottoms of CDs, causing the CDs to skip and fracture. They would then record the results of these experiments, and arrange the bits and pieces into whole new compositions (a notable example being their tour de force “Do While” from the album 94diskont). Another approach is to use software like Avocado Glitch, made by the software company Remain Calm. The software allows the user to set probabilities that something will go wrong with the sound passing through it. For example, one can set a 50% probability that the audio will skip several times, and then when one plays the audio back, there is a 50% chance that a glitch will occur. The way the audio is fractured is governed by chance.

With the advent of laptop computers with better processing capabilities, a generation of musicians began to realize the possibilities of using digital software to create both structured and improvised electronic music. The concept of laptop music was very appealing: the required equipment was incredibly mobile, and could also be used as a sound design tool by people with no musical training. One could set up a laptop and an interface in minutes and carry the whole kit and kaboodle in one’s backpack (though many add heftier pieces of equipment to their set-ups).

Fennesz’s core tools are his guitar, a mixing board, and his laptop. Employing the software MAX/MSP, which is an application for the manipulation of video, sound, and other media. Fennesz uses a plug-in for MAX/MSP called “lloopp” which allows him to manipulate a bank of audio samples on his laptop, both in the studio and on stage. When playing live, he processes his guitar playing in real time through this software; the two coalescing streams of audio form Fennesz’s trompe l’oreille sonic manipulations. It has always piqued my interest that Fennesz makes his gear public information: anyone can download MAX/MSP, install lloopp, and tinker with samples. What sets Fennesz apart is that his music is carefully thought out, a rare thing in glitch and abstract electronic music, which is notoriously tainted with atonal laptop jockeying and senseless futzing masquerading as high art. Indeed, it took him a month just to collect all the samples he felt fit his vision for Mahler Remixed.

Mahler Remixed caught my ear both because of its profound beauty and because it wholly reworks the source material, to the point of being altogether unrecognizable. While I found Mahler Remixed to be one of the most transcendent musical works I have ever heard, I had trouble appreciating Mahler on his own: his melodies shifted too rapidly from delicate and heartfelt to bombastic flights of dissonant fancy that made me feel sonically seasick. Transitions happened far too quickly for me to appreciate a relationship between the two different sensibilities. Now, I would say that I am exceptionally open to all forms of music, and to many types of formal variation. I have enjoyed albums of nearly incoherent noise; I also appreciate classical music generally. It is not a matter of being freaked out by Mahler, it is a matter of simply not enjoying his music – which made me wonder how I could enjoy Fennesz so much without really liking Mahler.
Perhaps altering the dynamics of the music can change one’s perception of the music? I talked to my mother, who pointed me in the direction of an NPR radio program titled “Speedthoven”; in which snippets of Beethoven’s 3rd and 5th Symphonies were played at a dizzying speed in comparison to the pace recommended on their scores. The result? With a little tempo boost, Beethoven rocks hard. Inversely, Fennesz’s deceleration of Mahler’s dynamic shifts, stretching the delicate for upwards of 10 minutes at a time, to be swallowed up in towering brief crashing crescendos, transforms the music from dramatic and overwrought to celestial and colossally grand.

What really helped me understand my preference for Mahler Remixed, however, was reading that Fennesz specifically picked samples of Mahler that fit into his own melodic sensibilities.

Ich habe viel darüber nachgedacht, viel gehört und mich letzten Endes dazu entschlossen, dass ich nur Teile von Mahler in meine eigene Klangwelt einbauen kann.

I thought about it a lot, listened a lot, and I finally decided that I could only use parts of Mahler in my own sound world.

Fennesz’s personal taste for melody is vitally present on Mahler Remixed, and this would explain why. 80% of Mahler Remixed is built on samples of Mahler’s ten symphonies, but Fennesz’s guitar work is vital to this performance, at times accompanying the crashing orchestral waves of modified Mahler with the dreamy shoegaze distorted glissando chords of My Bloody Valentine, and at one point inserting an entirely original piece (“Liminality,” from his album Bécs) around the halfway point of part two of Mahler Remixed. In itself a beautiful piece of music, “Liminality” also impressively matches the atmosphere of the performance, blending effortlessly with the wondering atmosphere found throughout.

A lot of the guitar work on this album is cleverly disguised, turned by audio manipulation, distortion and endless reverb into harmonically rich walls of sound. Fennesz is reluctant to use synthesizers to achieve otherworldly sounds, preferring to push the limits of what sounds can be coaxed out of his instrument. The clanking harmonics and feedback in the finale of part one sound like digitally shattered bells in an endless cathedral. The glissandoing chords that precede the wide-open, sorrowful, yet triumphant ascending guitar riff of “Liminality” could be an angelic choir, an ensemble of strings, but it could also just be Fennesz playing some pretty chords, modified with reverb and electronically reversed echoes.

To compare one of the world’s most renowned classical composers to an electronic musician is a difficult task. Fennesz himself stated: “Zu versuchen, Mahler zu toppen geht einfach nicht” – “Trying to top Mahler simply doesn’t work.”

Personally, I disagree.