Fennesz's Endless Summer turns 25. It was never really a glitch record.

Twenty-five years ago this summer, an Austrian guitarist released an album made of corrupted data and hummable tunes, and most of the people writing about it decided the corrupted data was the story. It wasn't. It has taken a quarter of a century for the other half to look obvious.

Endless Summer came out on Mego on 3 July 2001. Eight tracks, about forty-five minutes, recorded with a laptop, some guitars and pedals, and one Shure SM57, which is the microphone you buy when you are eighteen and cannot afford a second one. Pitchfork gave it 9.4 and put it second on its albums of the year. It has been sitting in the "laptop music" section of the record shop ever since, which is roughly as useful as filing Kind of Blue under trumpet.

The first two minutes are a trick

The album opens with "Made in Hong Kong," a couple of minutes of shredded static with no obvious pulse, and if you quit there you would file it exactly where everyone filed it. Then the title track arrives and there is a chord progression. An actual one, warm, cycling, the kind of thing a person could play badly on an acoustic guitar at a party. The static does not go away. It sits on top of the tune like weather.

That sequencing is deliberate and slightly mean. Fennesz makes you earn the melody by walking through the noise first, and once you have done that you cannot un-hear the melody underneath everything else on the record. "A Year in a Minute" is a pop song dissolving. "Happy Audio" closes the thing on something close to contentment, which was not a mood the Vienna underground was handing out freely in 2001.

Oval had already done the hard part

The technical breakthrough belongs to somebody else, and it happened six years earlier.

94diskont. (Mille Plateaux, 1995) was made by three Germans, Markus Popp with Sebastian Oschatz and Frank Metzger, who marked the underside of CDs so the players would stumble, then built music out of the stumbles. It is a proof rather than a record: error is a sound source, here is the evidence, thank you and good night. Twenty minutes of "Do While" will teach you more about what a CD player is actually doing than any essay. It is also, by design, not remotely interested in whether you feel anything.

Fennesz's contribution was cheap and much harder to copy. He put a tune under it. The processing on Endless Summer is not more advanced than Oval's; in places it is cruder. What changed is what the damage is for. Popp used digital error as a subject. Fennesz used it as a filter, the way a shoegaze band uses a wall of guitars, so that a simple, almost naive melody arrives already worn out, already half forgotten. If you want the technical lineage laid out properly, our guide to glitch and microsound does that job. This record is what happens when someone stops caring about the lineage.

The title is a red herring, and that is the point

Endless Summer takes its name from Bruce Brown's 1966 surf documentary, not the Beach Boys compilation that shares the title. Fennesz has said he was influenced by their music but that it was less intentional than people assumed. Everyone hears Brian Wilson in it regardless. Ask a room of listeners what the record reminds them of and you get sunlight, tape hiss, a beach nobody was actually at.

That is the whole trick, and it explains why the album survived and its contemporaries mostly did not. It manufactures nostalgia for something that never existed. You are not remembering a summer. You are remembering the format of a memory, which is a much more reliable thing to sell to a listener.

What people took from it

Fennesz cleaned the method up on Venice (Touch, 2004), which is prettier, more composed, and the one I would hand to a sceptic first.

The bigger inheritance went sideways. Tim Hecker recorded a pipe organ in a Reykjavik church and then took it apart in software.

Ravedeath, 1972 is not a Fennesz imitation, but it runs on the same principle: a sound with obvious emotional weight, degraded until the weight becomes the texture. Half the ambient section of any streaming service now runs on a watered-down version of the same idea, usually with the guitar left clean and the damage applied like a preset. That is the cost of inventing a move that is easy to approximate and difficult to actually do. Anyone building out from here should start with the far end of ambient rather than the playlists.

The label did not outlive its founder

Mego started in Vienna in 1994. Peter Rehberg, who recorded as Pita, ran it, relaunched it as Editions Mego in 2006, and put out Kevin Drumm, Emeralds and Oneohtrix Point Never on it. He also played in Fenn O'Berg with Fennesz and Jim O'Rourke, a trio that made three records of very funny, very abrasive improvisation that nobody talks about enough. Rehberg died of a heart attack on 22 July 2021, aged 53.

Fennesz has kept working without much fuss. Mosaic arrived on Touch in December 2024 and is the most settled thing he has made.

It is good. It is also, unavoidably, the sound of a man who found his one great idea in his late thirties and has spent the twenty-five years since refining it rather than replacing it. I do not think that is a criticism. Most musicians never find one.

Your turn

Twenty-five years on, the arguments worth having are the small ones. Is Endless Summer actually better than Venice, or does it just have the better story? Is "Made in Hong Kong" a great opening statement or two minutes you skip every time, honestly? And does calling this a glitch record tell anyone anything useful in 2026?

Rate it above and make your case underneath. I will be reading.