Released in a month which most music nerds spend pouring over year end best of lists and gorging on a buffet of unheard, exotic and often wildly disparate music, Flumina is basically the equivalent of a weeklong juice cleanse. While any collaboration between electronic producer Christian Fennesz and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto has always veered safely into minimal territory, this is easily their most ascetic thing yet; across two discs and two hours, it maintains an almost religious focus on the subtle, slyly shifting interplay between Sakamoto's wandering piano melodies and Fennesz's woolly atmospherics, never peaking or troughing in any dramatic or otherwise notable fashion, and in fact never moving too far from the style and sensibility that it establishes in its very first minutes. Whether you consider this discipline or laziness might depend entirely on how long you listen for, and how.
As with all of their collaborations-- as well as a lot of their individual efforts-- the emphasis here is on subtle shifts and interplays, and the rewards therein. Flumina spends the vast majority of its two hours vacillating between holy moments of harmony and others that are subsumed by an undercurrent of atonality and portent. If I were to try to illustrate the pattern by which Sakamoto's cascading piano notes and Fennesz's pulsing and gauzy guitar lines swarmed around each other, I'd guess I'd draw three parts responsiveness for every two parts of randomness. It's a thing that always threatens to unravel but never does.
There's a thrill to that, but there's also an inherent formula, and if these tracks feel more like formal exercises than structured compositions, it's because, well, they kind of are. Flumina is actually a concept record that Sakamoto hatched before going on tour earlier this year, and the concept itself is every bit as elegant as you'd expect from someone of his restraint. Beginning in March, he opened each live show by playing a new composition in a different key. By the end of April, he'd accumulated 24 recordings, each in a different key, thereby covering every tonal variant in modern Western music.
According to Sakamoto, these tracks were composed from afar with a Fennesz collaboration in mind. That's a lovely thought, and the fact that the record was released so soon after speaks to their mutual admiration. And yet, if one can complain about anything on an album as diffuse as this, it's that Fennesz isn't foregrounded often enough. While something like 2007's Cendre benefited greatly from an occasional splash of his cotton-wool electronics, there are very few moments like that here, and frankly, it needs more. Those who listen to Flumina actively for its full two hours might also miss that extra element. If you listen to Flumina like I do, though, passively or in short bursts, you're ultimately left with variations on the same thought: This is still an inspired combination.
