One thing that I particularly love about Christian Fennesz is that he only seems to surface with a new solo album when he has undergone some sort of significant creative breakthrough and has a fresh new vision to share. In recent years, those masterworks have settled into a reliable rhythm of roughly one every five years and Mosaic is the latest installment in that incredible run. Notably, Fennesz did not have clear vision when he began work on these pieces, but instead devoted himself to assembling the album piece by piece every single day until "the full picture" was revealed and the vision felt complete. Interestingly, the album is described as an echo of Venice in which the passing time has made "the division between the land, the horizon and the deep blue sea is more extreme," but it feels more like a descendant of Endless Summer to me. In this instance, however, the shimmering, sun-dappled beauty of the beach feels like a bleary and elusive memory of a past summer fitfully darkened by glimpses of a weightier melancholy. That said, the beach vibes prove to be impressively tenacious, so Mosaic feels more like the bittersweet final days of a summer on the seaside than it does a rueful reflection on happier past days.
I consider myself to be a somewhat devoted fan of Christian Fennesz's work, but I confess that I initially found myself a bit underwhelmed by the three pieces that were released in advance of this album, as they all felt more pleasant than revelatory at first listen. Once the full album was released, however, I threw on some headphones to immerse myself more fully in Mosaic and hoped that the expected sublime majesty would hit me eventually. Happily, the revelations started almost immediately and the biggest one was this: casual listening only reveals vibes and melodies, but the true beauty of this album lies far more in how it sounds (and how it flows) than it does in the actual chords and melodies being played. For example, listening to album highlight "Love and the Framed Insects" feels akin to gazing up at the passing clouds while floating on my back in the warm waters near a tropical beach, but the lapping waves keep submerging my ears to warp the sounds of summer bliss into something hallucinatory, unfamiliar, and sometimes otherworldly.
In keeping with that theme of unpredictability and disorientation, Fennesz notes that he experimented a bit with unusual time signatures and gives the 7/4 time of the aforementioned "Love and the Framed Insects" as one example. Uncannily, my other favorite piece ("Goniorizon") is given as the other example, as it began life as "six hard rock guitar riffs mixed on top of one another." While neither of those features was even remotely apparent to me when I listened to Mosaic, their effect was definitely felt and they are representative of a very fluid approach to composition that pervades the entire album: everything feels as slippery, elusive, and indistinct as a memory and pieces continually transform like tendrils of smoke rather than resembling rigid compositions with distinct sections in a specific order. For example, "Love and the Framed Insects" is essentially just a single simple chord progression, but the chords feel alive and kinetic and texturally resemble liquid glass continually morphing into new shapes like a mirage in a heat haze. Similarly, the chord progression in "Goniorizon" feels crystalline and undulating in way that suggests that the fabric of reality is sensuously and supernaturally rippling and bulging. Also, the chords feel like they have an endlessly shifting balance between ghostliness and physical form that feels like a beach scene witnessed through a lens that languorously drifts in and out of focus.
While I do have my favorites, Mosaic's remaining four pieces are each similarly compelling and unusual. For example, in the opener "Heliconia" (named after a plant informally known as the False Bird of Paradise), an epic-sounding surge of heavenly chords steadily builds in intensity before falling away to reveal a tender outro of warbly clean guitar. Elsewhere, "Personare" feels like a beatless dub techno piece time-stretched into spacey abstraction while being slowly sucked into a black hole (and the final thirty seconds are like a beautiful butterfly emerging from its space chrysalis). The following "A Man Outside," on the other hand, evokes the inside of a concrete parking garage in a rainstorm until the appearance of a gorgeously smeared and hallucinatory melodic figure transforms everything, while "Patterning Heart" has the washed-out and bleary unreality of a beautiful landscape viewed with the sun shining directly in your eyes. As impressive as some of the individual songs are, however, I was more beguiled by Fennesz's vision as a whole and how it seems tapped into the same zeitgeist as recent durational works by artists like Sarah Davachi and Kali Malone. While those two artists are pulled in a more ancient and timeless direction, Fennesz has himself found a more condensed and futuristic way to achieve a similar objective: drawing listeners' focus away from the obvious pleasures of melodies and harmonies and towards the mesmerizing (but more hidden) pleasures of how beautifully sounds can fray, dissolve, linger, transform, and move through space when the right person makes those details a priority.
