Let's green egg and ham it

I mentioned in an older post about Christian Fennesz’s 2001 ambient electronic album Endless Summer that his music is arranged in a very simple, spacious manner that makes it sound as if it wrote itself. That album in particular is characterized by warm, thick textures that seem to reflect the beauty of summer, but not taint it with any noticeable human presence. Fennesz’s 1997 album, Hotel Paral.lel, took a similar approach, but communicates a very different feeling. Whereas Endless Summer’s implied subject matter is the natural world with which everyone is familiar, Hotel Paral.lel represents the unfamiliar. It features droning songs with vague titles that paint a picture of minimialistic emptiness.

I found out about Fennesz from the 33 1/3 book about the Sonic Youth album Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns. In order to prove a point about how uniquely unsettling Daydream Nation is, he asks the reader to think of how many albums they’ve listened to that have genuinely frightened them, arguing that there shouldn’t be very many. The author provides a short list of his own, one of the items being Hotel Paral.lel. The first time I ended up hearing the album in its entirety, its position on that list held true. It was nighttime, all the lights were off, and I almost felt like something was about to jump out of my speakers.

Even the album’s pacing is brilliant. The majority of it contains little to no melody, structure, or even rhythm, except for two songs, “Fa” and “Aus,” placed strategically at the halfway point and end point of the tracklist respectively. While most of the album plunges the listener into a world of mysterious noises, these two tracks serve as Hotel Paral.lel’s brief moments of comfort, during which the swirling, sinister sounds begin to form a recognizable pattern.

And despite the music’s obscurity and repetition, (if “music” is what you’d like to call it) it left a huge personal impact on me. I used to be a big fan of video game music and chiptunes, and this album sounds as if Fennesz took those elements, rearranged everything, and stripped them down to an eerie whisper, to the haunting, bare skeleton of electronica. Plus, it’s so hypnotic that I actually find myself getting a lot more work done when I listen to it, which is definitely going to help me as finals start approaching.