Fennesz & Lillevan^AT+IE

Photo credit: Vera Marmelo

Fennesz is the solo project of Austrian musician, composer, and sound artist Christian Fennesz. Since the early 1990s, he’s stood at the intersection of electronic sound processing, guitar-based music, noise, and ambient, playing a key role in expanding the aesthetic possibilities of electronic music toward emotional, textural, and harmonic complexity.

Trained as a guitarist and initially active in rock and improvisational contexts, Fennesz began early on to radically rethink the electric guitar through digital signal processing. Melody, noise, and structure coexist on equal terms, creating a fragile balance between abstraction and immediate sensuality.

Fennesz gained international recognition in the late 1990s through releases on the influential label Mego, most notably with the album Endless Summer (2001), now widely regarded as a milestone in electronic music. The record combined digital interference with fragmentary, almost nostalgic harmonic gestures, opening new perspectives on ambient, glitch, and post-rock.

After studying politics and film theory and participating in the animation scene of the late eighties and early nineties, Lillevan grew disillusioned with retold stories and the lack of adventure in the film world. He soon found himself running clubs in Berlin instead, excited by the influx of artists from Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. These new impulses, coupled with new and affordable technologies, pushed him back into the world of moving imagery, this time with a new perspective and motivation to make the moving imagery he found missing in cinema and culture.

Since the mid-nineties he has investigated non-narrative facets of film, leading to completely abstract works and collage explorations of film history. His focus defines moving imagery as an instrument in its own right as opposed to accompanying music. For Lillevan, a working process takes place in a Godard-like search for the relationship between images, intensities and textures, a multi-layered process, giving each viewer the opportunity to focus on different details and moments.

Fennesz & Lillevan — 25 Years of Endless Summer
Live A/V | Canadian premiere

For its 25th year, Fennesz revisits his seminal ambient album Endless Summer with renewed perspective, expanding its luminous guitar textures and digital distortions into a deeply immersive live experience. Joined by visual artist Lillevan, the performance becomes a dialogue between sound and image; Fennesz’s shimmering harmonies, sun-bleached melodies, and intricate layers playing against Lillevan’s subtle yet powerful visual compositions of an emotional summer landscape.