Fennesz uses guitar and computer to create shimmering, swirling electronic sound of enormous range and complex musicality. "Imagine the electric guitar severed from cliché and all of its physical limitations, shaping a bold new musical language." - (City Newspaper, USA).
Christian Fennesz is know from his own particular musical world as well as his impeccable work in creating beautiful compositions for guitar. Somewhere between concrete music, classical and ambience sounds, he stretches musical resources and effects to create melodies and atmospheres that fuse classical and orchestral concepts with conceptual musical research and complex digital structures. He has been recording and also performing with Ryuichi Sakamoto and playing live with Keith Rowe, Sparklehorse, Mike Patton and many others. Fennesz has also worked alongside Peter Rehberg and Jim O'Rourke in the improvisional trio Fenn O'Berg, and with David Sylvian who sang on his album Venice and for whom Fennesz composed the music for the song "A Fire in the Forest" for David Sylvian album “Blemish”. Fennesz and Sakamoto released a collaborative album entitled “cendre”: “Ryuichi Sakamoto and Christian Fennesz blend the unstructured and imaginative qualities of improvisation with the satisfying sculpture of composition. Sakamoto's piano, his style reminiscent of Debussy and Satie, perfectly complements Fennesz with his powerful blend of shimmering guitar and passionate electronics.” Fennesz has done a 12 dates European tour together with Mike Patton, sharing the stage to do a “magic sonic duo” with unusual performance that is a hymn to radical creative freedom: electronic touches, krautrock landscapes, sampling, stormy drones, mellotron echoes, and mores. Fennesz remixed the track “In This Twilight” on Nine Inch Nails remix album “Y34RZ3R0R3M1XED”.
Rolling Stone described him as "the most pictorial composer-programmer in laptop electronica".
Fennesz’s guitar and laptop live set demonstrate why he remains one of the most engaging musicians using electronics. His treatment of the laptop and guitar allow each to give up its identity to the other, exquisite guitar washes loosing their specificity to the crackling textures of the laptop. Live guitar chords become loops on the laptop and he constantly shifts between contradictions and possibilities of each. Ben Bortwick (the wire 09/05)
)
