There’s a certain irony to the more intimate conversations I make through here and my art posts elsewhere that I’m actually quite a guarded person in real life and avoid emotional vulnerability. It’s always slightly alarming when someone says something to me that betrays the fact they’ve read something on HearFeel, but I find it more shattering when someone says something which reveals an understanding of my character or thoughts or feelings just through simple conversation. What other perceptions and observations do they have, that I’ve revealed, my obfuscations parted like so much smoke and air.
The truth is we all have detectable patterns and our true nature is never hidden from those with the capacity and intent to see them. We’re just origami and puzzle pieces and mosaicked tile people, formed of scintillating fragments we choose to present in discrete sections at a time: those we care about and those that care for us have the chance to see more of the whole.
One can’t help but wonder whether, after a career of almost 30 years, Christian Fennesz is reflecting similarly on the impressionistic revelations of his records over time, each another carefully laid piece of a broader catalogue that comes to define a greater whole when one looks at the sum of the parts. I don’t know, may never know, but there’s certainly something different about Mosaic. Idiosyncratically, aesthetically, still Fennesz (as always), but somehow softer and airier, more reflective yet also evasive.
Opener “Heliconia” defies the heavy pulsations of its predecessor Agora and “In My Room”, throbbing guitar and simmering washes of granularity traded for aqueous lightness and flowing chords that transmute to unfold with the careful petalled construction of its namesake. It has a sense of gentle revelation but only at a distance: like much of the record to come it seems to eschew scrutiny to hold itself at arms length.
Penultimate “Patterning” also seems to revive some of “Heliconia”‘s early navel-gazing in even more aerial drones this time, carving long-form evocations that move like cloud shadows across the surface of the sea. Always shifting, never quite still, never allowing the image of presented self to linger too long, or to repeat itself.
It’s not all calming: tempestuous interior “Personare” suddenly slews into grinding chord loops, buzzing and fretting this way and that. It casts an unsettled air full of disquiet: have we been too naive, revealed too much? Follower “A Man Outside” also seems to retreat, lost in distant drones and field recorded sound, glimmering fragmentary tones refracting it all back like the many facets of a shattered mirror.
In the end we never come close to catching something tangible that we can hang our preconceptions off of: finalé “Goniorizon” transforms into something more crystalline still, like some beautiful piece of cut diamond slowly turning to dance in the light. We only ever see what comes off its surface, prismatic and complicated: despite its growing insistences it never reveals what’s inside its clear and terrible heart.
What is expected is only a consequence of what people believe they understand of us, and their understanding is a result of what we allow them to know. Can we be upset when these things don’t align? Is their image of us from the knowledge they have any less valid than the image we hold of ourselves? This is certainly another Fennesz record, though perhaps not quite the one you’d “expect”.