Audiopile Review: Despite being one of the most influential and flat-out-best experimental electronic artists of the 21st-century, Christian Fennesz keeps an oddly low profile these days. You might even have missed his excellent 2024 album ‘Mosaic’, particularly as the Touch label only put it out on CD. The sole vinyl version so far has come via P-Vine in Japan. Did we get some copies in? What do we look like to you? Amateurs? Of course we got some fucking copies in! Like we said, ‘Mosaic’ is an excellent album. Its mixture of sandy textures and aquatic ambiance recalls 2008’s ‘Black Sea’. If anything, though, this album is even more ambitious and accomplished. Largely eschewing the more abrasive and chaotic elements of his signature sound, this is a Fennesz album you can really sink into.

This is Fennesz’s most reflective album to date. Composed and recorded at the end of 2023 and completed in the summer of 2024. Fennesz set up a new studio space, the third one in four years. He had no immediate concept, this time starting from scratch, with a strict working routine. He got up early in the morning, worked until midday then had a break and worked again until evening. At first, just collecting ideas, experimenting, improvising. Then composing, mixing and correcting. Yet the title came early, ‘Mosaic’, which mirrored this process of putting an element into place one at a time to build the full picture, an ancient technique of making an image, before pixels did it in a flash.

This ‘9 to 5′ working routine had already been developed on ‘Agora’ [Touch 2019]. All the other albums before were done differently; a few weeks work, then months in between and another few days or weeks of work. ‘Mosaic’ was done from beginning to end without a break.

Packaged in the now familiar DVD-style case with artwork and photography by Jon Wozencroft, there is an echo to ‘Venice’ but 20 years later the division between the land, the horizon and the deep blue sea is more extreme.

Fennesz experiments with unusual time signatures. It’s not obvious, but ‘Love and the Framed Insects’ is in 7/4. ‘Personare’ is somehow influenced by West African pop music from the 1980s. ‘Goniorizon’ originally consisted of six hard rock guitar riffs mixed on top of one another. Then it became this ‘thing’ that somehow opened possibilities for new things to come… all this adds up to a filmic, highly involving and beautiful score of diverse influences and multiple possibilities to be explored by the listener.