For three decades, Christian Fennesz has been on a tireless quest to unearth novel sounds and possibilities in electronic music. He creates shimmering, complex electronic soundscapes, buries and mutilates audio signals until they’re reborn as something new. The famously Vienna-shy musician is playing a rare Vienna show at Popfest Wien on July 28th at Karlsplatz – a short break from working on his next solo album, like this conversation with Sylvia Wendrock.
You play all over the world, but rarely in Austria. Still, your studio is in Vienna’s 7th District, and you’re able to work there in peace despite your prominence. Where do you feel at home?
Christian Fennesz: I moved my studio to the 5th District last year. I’m at home wherever I can settle in with some degree of comfort. So, that’s a new home in Vienna, and I’m really enjoying it. My studio here is very small; basically, everything has to fit on a single table. All my analog equipment is stored in the basement. But I’m happy; it’s all really good quality.
“I can’t hear the difference anymore.”
Have you followed the technology as it’s developed, or have you stuck to the equipment you’re familiar with?
Christian Fennesz: I used to rent a room in a commercial recording studio – a real classic studio, with mixing boards, analog audio equipment, synthesizers, a ton of guitars, microphones, big studio monitors, etc. But after I had to move out of there, I decided to work the way I had previously: in a small space with really good speakers and good equipment to compose and record. When I do have to record somewhere else, some friends have a good studio right around the corner. When it’s finished it goes to mastering anyway, where all the analog components come into play. Digital resolution has gotten so good that I actually can’t hear the difference anymore. It’s possible that my hearing has suffered some after decades of loud music – but 15 years ago, I could clearly tell real sound from synthesized. With all the high-definition plug-ins and tools these days, I can’t anymore.
Has that changed your musical thinking? Where do your sound ideas come from – do you have to search for them?
Christian Fennesz: Sometimes I try to shape a melody on the guitar, and then I just experiment with software and sounds. At some point, I arrive at a result that I can use. Those are different steps in the composition process, not dependent on the equipment. I essentially use the same equipment I always have, except that now the analog components have been replaced by digital plug-ins. Good monitor speakers that allow you to hear everything are crucial to the process.
Your last album, Senzatempo, came out in April. To me, it fits perfectly to early summer. At some points on “Floating Time”, I imagine I can hear crickets chirping. Is it a summer album?
Christian Fennesz: It’s not really my album; it’s actually by the Italian duo OZMOTIC. They invited me to play guitar and contribute a few epic sounds – I didn’t compose or mix anything. Unfortunately, my name got pushed to the top and it got marketed as a Fennesz album. It’s really not cool, and it happened without my knowledge. But it is what it is now: it’s a great album, but it’s definitely not mine; my contribution was relatively small. We worked together for a week in Turin; I was just a session musician. We’ve known each other for a while and have always made nice music together.
It seemed like it could be yours, since it came out around the time you usually release a new album – four years after the last one.
Christian Fennesz: I had to break off my U.S. tour because of the pandemic, and I wasn’t really able to promote the last album, Agora. It wasn’t until last year that I was able to tour for the album, twice in the U.S. and throughout Europe. So you actually have to add two years.
How do you organize your tours?
Christian Fennesz: My wife Mira is my manager, and I try to keep the concerts as close together as possible – if possible, to play for three weeks and then have six months where I can work. In Europe, though, I still play in between now and then; ‘one-off’ shows are more common here. That means I have two concerts now in July, and then nothing else until October. I’m hoping to get my album finished in those three months, so that I can bring it out before the end of the year.
“Ideas start flowing as soon as I turn my equipment on.”
How do you get your ideas?
Christian Fennesz: They start flowing as soon as I turn my equipment on and start improvising. Every now and then I use the recording app on my phone or acoustic guitar to capture melodic sketches. But over time, I’ve compiled a huge archive that I can draw from anytime. I forget a lot of things, and then I stumble over them again and work on them some more.
You studied guitar and ethnomusicology, is that right?
Christian Fennesz: My final project for the music high school was a piece by Johann Sebastian Bach on classical guitar. At the same time, I was always playing in bands; I had a punk band when I was 14. I even taught guitar for a short time when I was in college, but I never actually studied guitar…although I do teach a few lessons on the music university once a semester. Essentially, I taught myself guitar. I studied ethnomusicology and musicology – I wanted to write my dissertation on West African pop music in the 60s, but somehow, I got stuck in the middle of it. I had already gotten my first commissions for theater and dance, and I realized that I was a very poor researcher, but maybe a better musician. So I switched sides.
I imagine some fruitful encounters helped you along the way – practically indispensable in the electronic music scene in the 90s.
Christian Fennesz: I actually come from the underground rock scene. I played in bands that sounded a little like Sonic Youth or My Bloody Valentine. I started getting interested in electronic music as early as the 1980s and met Brian Eno, David Sylvian, and Ryuichi Sakamoto. They’re really good friends – or were; Sakamoto died in March. That mixture definitely influenced my sound. At the same time, I was always interested in jazz and improvisation, and I met great people [from that scene] as well.
What [musical] language do you speak in the various collaborations you’ve participated in – for instance, the trio Fenn O’Berg?
Christian Fennesz: In 1995 or ’96, [Peter Rehberg and I] got invited to play at a jazz festival, even though we played this crazy electronic music. While we were there, we met Jim O’Rourke. It turned out that he was a big fan of ours, and we decided to play a spontaneous session onstage…and it was so cool that we continued it. Fenn O’Berg went on an extensive tour in Europe, then in Japan, and then the two or three albums, of course.
“It was really hard for me.”
And how did you meet Ryuichi Sakamoto?
Christian Fennesz: That was in 2002, when I was in New York on tour. David Sylvian told him I was in town, and he just called me up and asked me to come over – he had a really beautiful, pleasant studio in his house in the West Village. We spent the entire day together, jammed, ate, drank a little wine. It was really comfortable, and completely obvious that we had to work together.
What is it like to lose someone to whom you’ve had such a strong connection? Peter Rehberg died two years ago, Ryuichi Sakamoto just this year.
Christian Fennesz: Terrible. It was really hard for me. We spent so much time together, all these tours – with Peter, too. I was with him the first time I went to Japan, the first time in Australia, the first time I toured in America, too. It was the same with Ryuichi: we toured a lot as a duo, mostly in Italy, Spain, Japan, also a little bit in America. Touring, you get to know someone really well; it’s like losing members of my family. We chatted on iMessage three days before he died. And then his wife called me and said he was gone…and I had to go onstage in Malmö, Sweden. It was really awful.
So you don’t do collaborations for the money.
Christian Fennesz: My best friends are musicians. It’s just really wonderful to meet friends and play together; that’s why I do it. Besides, we’re all a little different; each of us has our strengths and weaknesses. I can always learn something new. Jim O’Rourke, for example: he’s practically a Renaissance man. Every time I’m with him in the studio, it’s a great experience. And he’s fascinated that I have such a strange approach to things.
“I’m an FM radio geologist.”
In other interviews, you’ve spoken a lot about tuning the guitar a third lower, and Max/MSP even lower than that, to get down into the lower levels. Are you a musical archaeologist?
Christian Fennesz: That’s a good way of putting it. Mark Linkous from Sparklehorse once said to me that I’m an archaeologist of 1970s pop music, an FM radio geologist. And in a way, he’s right. Melodies from my childhood are still very much present.
Do you theorize your music?
Christian Fennesz: Not overtly, and not at the beginning. But afterwards I do, in order to understand what I’ve done. For example, I often find certain chord progressions more interesting than others – for instance when I switch from the first to the seventh scale degree. I try to get to the bottom of that so that I can find connections to existing music, like from Chopin or Bach. I learned a lot about that from Ryuichi Sakamoto.
What do you consider ‘your’ instrument?
Christian Fennesz: Both guitar and laptop. The analog instrument together with laptop and studio are my instrument as well.
Do you just focus on what you’re doing now, or do you hold to personal milestones?
Christian Fennesz: You can’t do that; otherwise, you’ll never get any further. Finished things can stand for themselves. People have been waiting for another Endless Summer for a long time – but what’s the point? I did it already. I have no desire to repeat myself; I’ll get bored.
It’s the dialectic of being a musician: creating a recognizable sound by consistently trying out and producing new things.
Christian Fennesz: It’s so hard. I worked with David Sylvian on his album Blemish after the end of his contract with Virgin Records. He sent me the recordings, and I told him that his fans were going to freak out, that they wouldn’t understand the music. It had gotten much more abstract; all the ambient melodies were gone. His next album, Manafon, was even more extreme – his entire fan base was furious, and they all deserted him. Then, at some point, they understood it and came back to him. It was really interesting.
“When I can be that noisy…it almost makes it fun again.”
An artist works for and from themselves, but they’re still dependent on feedback from the audience – as COVID made abundantly clear.
Christian Fennesz: I was very fortunate – I scored ballets and dance pieces from Damien Jalet, a Belgian choreographer who’s a friend of mine. His works are very excessive, almost kitschy. But he likes my music, and he asks for it a lot. Working with him can be difficult, for instance when he calls me at four in the morning to tell me bar 43 needs to be one second longer. Our friendship comes under a lot of strain sometimes. But his pieces are incredibly virtuosic, with spectacular light shows, and they get performed in all the big houses in the world. The royalties are good. Of course COVID was frustrating, though I did enjoy the calm during the first lockdown.
Do you do sound design for theater, ballet, film?
Christian Fennesz: It’s all through-composed, but it’s incredibly difficult work. For the money, so to speak. Interestingly, though, I can get pretty radical and heavy, maybe as a counterbalance to the mainstream and kitsch.
Music can dare a lot more when it’s accompaniment.
Christian Fennesz: Sure. When I can be that noisy, almost violent, it almost makes it fun again.
“we were all in one place, all exchanging ideas.”
Was there a key moment for your embracing of electronic music? Or was it your first experience with a sampler?
Christian Fennesz: I was working on music for a theater piece at the time, and I was able to afford my first Ensoniq sampler with an integrated sequencer. It sounded great. I immediately started to record with it, and it was extremely liberating. Suddenly I was a producer; I could record my own music. I went public with it, immediately started making the album for Mego. The Vienna label Synthaktik made a 7-inch; I quickly made contacts in London. All of a sudden, I was in the scene. Summer jobs made the available production equipment progressively more affordable.
That wasn’t true of the guitar.
Christian Fennesz: That would never have worked. At that time, some of the studios had these cheap Fostex playback machines – next to them, my sampler sounded really legit. The beginnings of the techno and house scenes was really fascinating to me too. Everything fresh and new.
You had to network.
Christian Fennesz: People were doing really different things: drum’n’bass, Kruder & Dorfmeister’s downtempo, the Cheap Records clique with Patrick Pulsinger, techno, and Mego. We were the weirdos, the people making really out-there stuff. But we were all in one place, all exchanging ideas. Really beautiful.
Are you your only critic?
Christian Fennesz: Mostly. Sometimes my wife and manager Mira says something, and she’s always right. Especially after touring I’m extremely tired, and my enthusiasm is low, but that can change. You can’t force inspiration; either it comes or it doesn’t. That can change in a matter of days. For months I had no idea what to do, and then in a few days, I have the tracks. I can live with those frustrating moments – I do have a great job.
Sylvia Wendrock, translated from the German original by Philip Yaeger