Review Summary: Discount pantomime: ambient Emperor's New Clothes
Insofar as it's 'about' anything, ambient music is about imagination — it's a genre built not on the spoon-fed gratification of Things Happening, but on suggestive power and the creative choices
you make as a listener, consciously or not. What does this involve? Uh, anything from inferring deeply personal experiences or emotional states through active contemplation of the music's aesthetic stimulus, to the wonderfully practical Eno sense of adjusting our relationship with the spaces around us through passive listening; it's about giving oneself over to a formless, uncharted middle-distance and trusting that there's something intuitive and concrete in the music that will steer you through to the other side. Good ambient can make a lucid dreamer out of anyone — it gives us new resolutions, new environs, new impulses in which to dream, and in some cases it transforms what is too often dismissed as an escapist refuge to a powerful act of connection.
I do not feel like a dreamer when I listen to Fennesz. At best, there is something curated and expositional about his work, as on his 2004 record
Venice, a sense that his currents of glitch and noise have been carefully arranged into something intricate and ear-catching for our benefit; at worst, these same elements collide with his ebullient approach to melody and boorish guitar intrusions, panning out as a kitsch mishmash of sentimentalist muzak and vapid abstraction. Both scenarios are too palpably engineered to prompt more than detached observation — I have never felt an impetus to either dream myself into his world, or to usher it into mine — and his latest effort
Mosaic compounds all the most tedious qualities of his past stumbles with the extra sin of being a one-note traipse, contrary to the heterogenous makeup of the titular artform.
Fennesz' ear for striking textures takes the spotlight precisely once here: through the latter minutes of the opener "Heliconia", he plucks and rakes his guitar as though putting it on life support, the stark tone of the instrument a fragile contrast to the densely processed sound that otherwise dominates the album. It produces a genuinely compelling tension and sets the bar modestly high, this but proves to be an early peak: the remaining five tracks lay down one languorous chord pattern after another, their digital modulations and cavernous reverb settings spread too thin to patch the threadbare cast-offs the album's palette would sell you as high fashion. "Love and the Framed Insects" is a particular offender here, its scuzzy haze dreary from the start and stultifying in its refusal to speak beyond the echo of distant guitar soliloquising, as is the closer "Goniorizon", which fritters excessive effects modulations over a cloying central motif, gaudy and artless as too many bells being rung in unison. The run from the former to the latter is too turgid for any interim glimmers of potential to shift the focus — take "A Man Outside"'s patient interplay of tinkling glitch against the swell of an ominous drone, or "Patterning Heart"'s comparatively stirring chord progression — and one emerges from the album in a mindless funk, short-changed by its aesthetic promise and keenly aware of the passage of time.
Mosaic carries all the stuffiest qualities of a bad art installation, and its chief silver lining is the very good chance that the unimaginative bedroom guitarists who feed off this kind of swill will themselves surpass it. No amount of love for someone else's pedalboard can justify sitting through this thing.
