Customer Reviews

Hotel Parallel

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Mego is the hippest label on the planet right now, and Fennesz is among its top artists. The material on Hotel Parel.lel is concerned with original soundsources, data files, designing process algorithms, the value of noise - generally how to do radically new things in what we still call `rock music' with computational resources. But, as well as being arty and intellectual, this music is raw, powerful, and iconoclastic, with a real urgency: the way Fennesz carefully chooses environmental soundsources and painstakingly transforms guitar samples, only to trash all that with screeds of distortion and ugly sine tones, is electrifying and inspiring like nothing I have heard since the Sex Pistols. Like the Pistols, this music clears your mind and convinces you that everything you normally hear is second-rate. The whole disc has a close-up, in-ear direct-inject sound which gives it incredible freshness and purity. The central tracks, `santora', `dheli plaza', and `fa', are intense, hyperactively creative topographies which are the same time clean, solarized rushes of noise, like The Stooges or The Velvet Underground. The music is, at core, like that of these other inspiring artists: super-intelligent, self-referential, self-defining - and cool. It doesn't seem to care what anyone thinks of it. Before I overstate all this, though, let me make it clear that the music has real, undeniable beauty, and is endlessly interesting and repeatable (for gorgeousness, just listen to `uds', or `aus').

This record is one of the highground releases in a new movement coalescing around a kind of hyperintelligent punk electronica which restores the DIY aesthetic to music with new, mass-accessible tools (basically, the powerbook). Hotel Paral.lel is an essential record. It sounds like an approaching revolution.

This album is a skittery, jittering collection of textures that manages to be simultaneously noisy and lovely, like the best of Oval's work. This strangely calming array of digital fragments belongs in any basic primer on digital music.

Im new to the whole noise as music concept, but i have grown to appreciate a well constructed collage of sound, just as i've learnt that every entire musical genre has moments of truth and integrity...There are a few intruiging moments on the textures throughout this hollow album but for the most part we are looking at the controled experiments of tempo and static and not really rising above that, other albums by the artist engage in their subtleties more effectively then the controlled experiement of this cold sound in a vacuum.