Pitchfork

Austria's Christian Fennesz is among the most vital artists from the abstract edge of the electronic music spectrum, in part because he never stops growing. Whether he's remixing the indie pop band Junior Boys, immersing himself in improv with Fenn O'Berg and Polwechsel, or crafting dark songs in tandem with David Sylvain, Fennesz is constantly challenging himself while holding on to and developing his core style. That he sometimes fails is a testament to his willingness to step outside his comfort zone.

Add one-man entertainment industry Ryuichi Sakamoto to Fennesz' long list of collaborators. This unlikely pair is at present working on an album together, and this teaser EP consists of a single 19-minute track they performed live last year at a festival in Italy. Sakamoto has been working in music too long and in too many contexts to be summed up in a few words. Being a key member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra is a career for most, but for Sakamoto YMO was just the beginning. Since then there have been dozens of records including film scores, vocal pop records, orchestral compositions, and ambient mood music, not to mention a number of acting gigs. Now Sakamoto joins Fennesz shoulder-to-shoulder in front of their laptops to fill a concert hall with challenging computer music.

When I finish this review and put Sala Santa Cecilia back on the CD shelf, I'm definitely going to file it with my Fennesz releases. There's no way for me to know for sure who is doing what in this collaboration, but the texture and structure of the music fits nicely alongside the more serene and dreamy passages of Live in Japan. It starts with the two men tuning their machines, playing with and discarding an assortment of eerie and uncertain industrial tones, then locking the pieces that fit into pointy spires of sound. They never stay in one place long, though, as the music is constantly shifting and being bumped off track. During a long stretch of small buzzes and thumps the piece seems adrift and on the verge of floating away into chaos. But then a tender symphonic drone, which sounds to me like it was constructed by a guy with deep understanding of film music and storytelling, pulls the piece back into itself to close with an extremely long and wistful fade to black.

Santa Cecilia being the patron saint of church music and this performance having taken place of Rome, it's not hard to read into this piece a kind of gothic drama. The long glitchy passage aside, Sala Santa Cecilia sounds deep and wide, like it was meant to echo inside an enormous room with dark stone walls. If I'm understanding the division of labor correctly, Sakamoto's outsized orchestral flair is an excellent compliment to the more fastidious choices made by Fennesz, and the ideas presented here, while exciting on their own, bode very well for the upcoming full-length.