- For this collaboration between Christian Fennesz, Martin Brandlmayr (of Radian, Trapist, Autistic Daughters, Polwechsel, etc.), and Werner Dafeldecker (Autistic Daughters, Polwechsel, The Year Of, etc.), conceptual clarity sits nicely alongside the intense pleasures of the audible; structure meets sensuality. Released as a double-disc set, the second disc features three short pieces built from improvisations, from which the trio magpie source material for the first disc's thirty-five minute long composition. This means everything here's clear and consistent, sited nicely between the melancholy warp and weft of Fennesz's guitar/laptop threnodies, and the considered pauses and night-time dramatics of Brandlmayr and Dafeldecker's more song-based output.
Till The Old World's Blown Up…'s second disc functions pretty much as you'd expect—a kind of muted, lambent post-rock that's all grain and tone, with Fennesz's swarms of guitar tangling with the bell-droplets of Brandlmayr's percussion. His playing is the most arresting thing here—it's interesting to hear a player who's simultaneously structurally rigid and able to stretch his playing into the same areas of microtonal inflection and redrawing-via-repetition as The Necks' Tony Buck. "Me Son"'s melancholy guitar lines inch toward the epic, though any melodrama here seems more gestural than overt—as far as rock music goes, which is where "Me Son" is heading, it's pretty lowercase.
This is all an afterthought compared to the title track, though, which consumes the entirety of the first disc. I mentioned Australian jazz trio The Necks earlier, and their vigilance surely informs the ebbs and flows of "Till the Old World's Blown Up…" It's a remarkably paced, measured construction, attesting to its four-year gestation period not through the overworking typical of such an extended stretch, but rather through its thoughtfulness—you can hear the music and the musicians thinking, figuring how best to fold together their discreet, gorgeous sound sources.
Continually receding into silence, "Till the Old World's Blown Up…" has the quality I look for in a lot of music, but rarely find—its stoic patience slowly yields surprising warmth. It sits nicely alongside The Necks' Aether and Bark Psychosis's "Pendulum Man," if you're looking for reference points, and I daresay that its quizzical construction and openness means it's a more intriguing listen, if not a stronger one, than Fennesz's Black Sea, perhaps because it's not sold on being a definitive statement.
TracklistCD 1
01. Till the Old World's Blown Up and a New One Is Created
CD 2
01. Tau
02. Jets
03. Me Son