Neuguitars 2024 #25 Fennesz's "Venice" turns twenty, I have to talk about it

It's done now. Fennesz has also begun his personal work of anthological archiving and canonization of his own musical production. From August 23, 2024, in fact, you can buy the updated, extended and remastered reissue of one of his masterpieces from 2004: the album "Venice", the happy successor to the amazing "Endless Summer" that had unequivocally established the talent of this brilliant Austrian guitarist.

To tell the truth, the first notices of this remastering work, official title "Venice 20", had already been noticed in May 2024 with the announcement of the new single, digital-only format, entitled "Sognato di Domani".

On Fennesz's bandcamp page and website it was announced: “'Sognato di Domani' is a new recording made by Christian Fennesz, completed in the context of his upcoming album due for release later this year. In parallel with making new work, we are planning to present a 20th anniversary release of 'Venice', which will be ready very soon in its remastered splendour. 'Sognato di Domani' fitted the complexion of this earlier 2004 classic quite exactly, and in many ways revitalises it. The track you will hear on the 'Venice 20' CD is an edited version of the digital release we present now: the full version. The photography is an out-take from the footage captured for 'Liquid Music', made in 2001 and planned for the technically impossible DVD release in 2005.”

On August 9, again on his website, Fennesz announced: The 20th anniversary re-issue of Fennesz's best-selling 'Venice', originally released in 2004, “is now available as a deluxe version remastered by Denis Blackham, with new and extra tracks not on the previous CD or vinyl versions. Included in the DVD-format edition is a booklet with texts by Fennesz himself, Denis Blackham & Jon Wozencroft, with unseen photographs from the original 2004 sessions. The booklet also reproduces David Sylvian's original handwritten lyrics for 'Transit'. This "stunning collaboration with David Sylvian continues where their fantastic duo track on Sylvian's album Blemish left off. Situated directly in the middle of a mostly subdued listening experience, 'Transit' literally bursts out of the speakers accentuating the album's more pop-like characteristics as well as its more restrained moments." “

Why is this reissue so important, even though I personally decided not to buy it, as I have owned the first version for almost 20 years? For two excellent reasons, first because it is a beautiful album that, after all this time, has never lost its shine and freshness; second because Fennesz is one of the musicians who has best been able to renew and create new research paths for the electric guitar.

I have noticed that in my library there are at least ten CDs by Fennesz, some of which are autographed. I admit, I am a hedonistic listener, but I have never allowed my sense of duty to interfere with such a personal passion as buying CDs and LPs, nor have I ever bought so many records, crudely, in piles. That persevering ten highlights, therefore, the continuous “listenability” of Fennesz’s music, a condition that in English is called, I think, “readableness”.

My encounter with Fennesz's elaborate guitar happened in 1998, in the studios of Radio Base Popolare in Mestre where I was helping, having fun, some friends in the preparation of their radio program White Noise, dedicated to frontier music. One evening a friend, I don't remember who, brought this CD, slipped into a white, red and black cardboard case, where the drawing of a prohibition on a palm tree was clearly visible and listening to which really left us speechless. It was that "PLAY", a mini CD produced by Mego that contained two covers: "Paint it Black" by the Rolling Stones and "Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)" which anticipated, but we at the time could not have known, that "Endless Summer" that would have made us shout miracle a few years later. We were in the midst of the "glitch" era and discovering a guitarist who was able to evolve his glacial aesthetics thanks to sounds generated from the guitar and not through synthetic processes, was a nice surprise.

A surprise that became a consolidated confirmation in 2004 when “Venice” appeared, and there too it was love at first listen. “Venice” showed a baroque kaleidoscope of sounds and compelling guitar harmonics, where the enthusiasm for glitch aesthetics, for sound fragmentation, for digital noises and, above all, for the guitar were revived. This album shows a surface made of unstable, iridescent sounds, now compact and dense, now rarefied and disturbed by hisses, random electronic impulses. If you want to try the experience of a true immersion in sound this album is for you: intricate soundscapes, drones, a hypnagogic rain; the result is a balanced mix of abstraction, emotion and pure suggestion. The musical context, previously easily untranslatable and artificial, reveals its real substratum only when a sound becomes traceable to the human experience of "common feeling" and the listener can recognize its natural origin, celebrating the conceptual aspiration of this ambitious work: the exploration of the relationship between analog and digital through the masking, dissimulation and transformation of what is audible in reality. Fennesz, the Austrian wizard of guitar-processing, maintains, as always, a very personal taste for certain melodies almost hidden in the complex texture of his digital drifts. Buy the new edition? What do you think? Should I buy it?