Christian Fennesz is a sculptor. Each sound carefully shaped, every note obsessed over, every texture moulded to perfection. The Viennese artist crafts every second of music that he puts to record. Juxtaposing the analogue swoon of shoegaze guitars and synths against glitchy electronics, it would be fitting, although ultimately a disservice, to describe Fennesz as an ambient artist. The depth of fine detail that runs through the heart of his compositions surpasses the vast majority of his contemporaries in that loose genre and with each new piece Fennesz conjures an entire musical landscape, from the sun-kissed beaches of Endless Summer to the barren wastelands evoked by the masterful Black Sea. With Seven Stars, the world Fennesz inhabits is shrouded in the same impressionistic haze that hovered over 2004’s Venice, only now the day has waned into early evening leaving behind the blazing mid-afternoon sun of that LP.
Christian Fennesz is a scientist: the four pieces that compose this album trace out precise arcs in space and time, guided from first to last by exact calculation. Perhaps more of a scientist on this record than ever before, Fennesz is working with structures that would be better described as carefully engineered than artistically sculpted. Negotiating its way through uneasy low end rumbles skirted by industrial noise, the musique concrète of ‘July’ slowly melts away into the more comfortable, if still somewhat chilly, sounds of a lone guitar gently undulating between chords. However, though undoubtedly a remarkable construction, ‘July’ fails to connect on any more subtle a level, a sterile exercise in form devoid of underlying flare. On the title track, Fennesz again takes a disappointingly measured approach. The inclusion of drums on Seven Stars should have brought in a propulsive outside force to compliment Fennesz’s abstract palette, but instead it seems every effort has been made to minimise their impact on his established sound. Plodding deliberately, completely submerged beneath the drifting soundscape, the addition of percussion is sadly rendered redundant by Fennesz’s unwillingness to stray outside of his comfort zone.
“I wanted to make a record that has a certain lightness about it”. The problem is that the “lightness” Fennesz talks of too often manifests itself as a lack of substance in his music. The floating organ chords washing over ‘Shift’ certainly have a weightless quality to them, forming a vaporous cloud of sound that seems as if it could disappear altogether if studied too hard, but the track lacks any form of anchor and comes off feeling almost too vague, too inconsequential. Taken as a whole, Seven Stars runs for just shy of 25 minutes, and over this brief time there are precious few moments that really distinguish themselves from their unassuming surroundings. Whilst this is doubtless a pleasant record from a consistently boundary-pushing artist, it is hard to feel satisfied with something quite so insipid.