Revisiting Christian Fennesz' 2001 album Endless Summer six years later brings to mind one of my favorite single lines from a critic. In 1963, film writer/maker Jonas Mekas asserted in his Village Voice column that 8mm film, including amateur footage rediscovered and presented in a different context, was the future of the medium. He mentioned reels with sunsets casually shot in Arizona by vacationing New Yorkers and said that "time is laying a veil of poetry over them."
That notion kept running through my head while returning to this record, despite the different context. Time has indeed laid a veil of poetry Endless Summer, not that it needed it. It's aged very well, but there's more going on hearing it in 2007 than just revisiting a good record. From the beginning, this album was about memory, decay, and reference; it wondered how deeply an original idea could become distorted and still retain its content. Fennesz used digital bits to refract and bend ideas about warmth in pop music, and his work has been mellowing in history's dark cellar. Which is to say, *Endless Summer * sounds even better now.
It also sounds very 2001 somehow, and not just because it basically soundtracked the second half of that insane year for me. There's something almost naïve going on in some of these tracks, despite the music's careful construction. For all the guitar/computer interface we've heard since, nothing has sounded as naked as the simply strummed chords of the title track. They sway in front and force you to hear the strings and body in a new way because of their presence on an experimental record issued by Mego. Fennesz had it down conceptually. He borrowed the chords from the Sandals' 1964 instrumental "Theme From the Endless Summer" and immersed the changes in 10 feet of crashing water, a wall of prickly sound that drives your face into a sharp layer of broken seashells. And that is the entry point.
Even when the guitars hang back a bit and let the processing provide most of the texture, there is still song structure and melody. The opening "Made in Hongkong" serves as a transition from the world of his previous record, the striking but comparatively challenging Plus Forty Seven Degrees 56' 37" Minus Sixteen Degrees 51' 08", meeting that blizzard of noise halfway with rolling chords and bits of a tune and then carrying the heavy stuff into this warmer, more welcoming place. "A Year in a Minute" is a canny exercise in stasis, pointing to film drama in a drone piece that seems to shoot beams of sound toward the sky like a rotating klieg light. "Caecilia" is as nakedly pretty as Fennesz has allowed his music to get to date, all delicate quivers, the feeling of excited nervousness made into sound. And then there are the few merely good moments that keep the original Endless Summer from perfection. The CD-skipping exercise "Before I Leave" is pleasant but insubstantial, and the static-heavy, organ-driven 10-minute closer "Happy Audio" is terrific but seems to come from a slightly different disc.
I'm not crazy about the idea of reissuing records in a new edition only a few years after they first come out, even if the album in question is a "classic" like this one. Fennesz, it seems, knew what he was doing when he designed his original track list, and the two new bonus tracks here won't add much to the legacy. "Badminton Girl", originally released in 2001 on a Fat Cat split, is quite nice but sounds a bit like a sketch for "Made in Hongkong", without the constant sense of change. The previously unreleased "Endless" is of even less consequence, consisting of just a quiet hum without much in the way of mood.
No matter, Endless Summer still works fantastically well and if this reissue allows a few new people to enjoy it, all the better. It wasn't just Fennesz' artistic breakthrough, but the breakthrough for a new style of electronic music that found a way to channel the latest developments in software into something that worked the way music has always worked and had appeal beyond just the genre heads. It was also Pitchfork's No. 2 album of 2001, which is sort of amazing. The only downside is that it set the bar too high, to a place none of the many followers since have managed to clear.
