Album Review: Mosaic by Fennesz

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.

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It often feels as though we are living in a golden age of glitched out ambient music, as evidenced by the work of artists such as Ulla and KMRU. It's difficult to imagine this present musical landscape without the work of one Christian Fennesz, who along with other artists on the Mego and Mille Plateaux labels helped pioneer the usage of the laptop as a musical instrument. But even as computer music has evolved dramatically in the almost thirty years since his debut with Hotel paral.lel, Fennesz continues to operate in a field of his own.

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