Available to pre-order now on bandcamp
Release date: 6th December 2024
Track Listing: [CD – 6 tracks]
1. Heliconia
2. Love and the Framed Insects
3. Personare
4. A Man Outside
5. Patterning Heart
6. Goniorizon
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.
Recorded by Christian Fennesz at Seven Fountains/Vienna between January and May 2024
Mastered by Denis Blackham
Photography & design by Jon Wozencroft
Published by Touch Music/Fairwood Music (UK) Ltd
For more information, you can visit his website here
Reviews:
CHAIN D.L.K. (net):
5/5
Fennesz’s “Mosaic” is an album as delicate and intricate as its name suggests, piecing together sonic fragments into something vast and immersive. Created with a meticulous, almost meditative process, Fennesz assembled this work layer by layer, as if restoring a forgotten memory or constructing a sonic monument.
There’s irony in its mechanical working routine – the “9 to 5” approach – because “Mosaic” feels anything but formulaic. It breathes in moments of improvisation, taking unpredictable turns. The album’s opener, “Heliconia,” drifts in with a weightless, crystalline shimmer, setting the mood for a meditative yet dynamic sonic exploration. Then there’s “Love and the Framed Insects” in 7/4 time – a rhythmic decision that nods to his knack for subverting expectations, presenting complexity as subtlety. The West African influences on “Personare” are yet another twist, drawing connections between distant musical worlds.
What makes “Mosaic” stand apart from Fennesz’s earlier works – like “Agora” or even “Venice” – is its sense of maturity, a reflective patience. Here, time moves differently. Each track feels like an architectural structure in sound, designed with careful precision,but imbued with an organic pulse. The guitar textures, always a hallmark of Fennesz’s sound, are present but seem more submerged, part of the overall collage rather than the focal point. Take “Goniorizon” for instance: originally built from hard rock riffs, it somehow transforms into something cinematic, a constantly shifting soundscape of fractured beauty.
The beauty of “Mosaic” lies in its contradictions. It is, on one hand, a highly intellectual project built through methodical experimentation with time signatures and structures. Yet it feels deeply emotional, even mystical – an invitation to explore hidden spaces, to hear the whispers of sound ghosts hiding in its layers. The album title echoes this balance: a mosaic is both a constructed image and an organic whole, each piece significant yet incomplete without the others.
With “Mosaic”, Fennesz once again proves he’s not just a musician but a sonic architect, crafting worlds for us to inhabit, even if only for a moment before they dissolve into the ether. It’s an album where science meets dream, precision meets poetry, and sound itself becomes an ancient language we’re invited to rediscover. A real jewel! [Vita Camarretta]
