Fennesz – Endless Summer

Label: Mego Format: CD,LP

Endless Summer - sleeve detailInteresting.

We in Los Angeles have to suffer through the endless re-viewing of this surf escapade. It’s expected. It’s part of Western (literally) cinema, much now like a muscle in the face that one uses but forgets exactly what its purpose is. And yet these sounds scuttle like the smallest parts of that film – ones that are never popularly noticed, even after a hundred viewings. These sounds remind a bit of watching a line of ants while sitting on the sidewalk at the Hollywood Christmas Parade. They’ve been there all along. They are spectacular in themselves.

Grains of sand push their way past the microphones and muddy up the eddies of the sounds surfing from one point of the melody to the next. It is unclear if there are extracts from the original soundtrack occuring throughout this vacation but it would follow. Snatches of guitar are repeated and etc., like going over some old postcard from the ends of the earth and wishing we were here. Or is it the halfheard strains of not going into the theatre but standing outside the door and listening to the waves crash ashore? Shaking and shifting bells and vibras make their way through the ether of the record, calliope singing on the pier as the wooden horses race into the eternal but not the infinite.

The wavecrests spray their seed in white gouts and it’s all here, chronicled in a summer that can truly be endless and unchanging, as long as your CD player holds out. Infinite repeat. The CD repeat comes in at various angles, exploring various parts of sound – striking out for the beach and seeing how far it goes, in which direction? Or is it riding one wave after another, switching paths to catch the biggest, gnarliest and most awesome curl? The vinyl crackles and pops as though the surfboard is being dragged across the sand to catch that last big wave, that one, over there, engulfing and water covers water covers earth…

-David Cotner-

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