This pairing is long overdue. Christian Fennesz and Jim O’Rourke have been tourmates and co-participants in the laptop collage trio Fenn O’Berg (with Peter Rehberg, a.k.a. Pita) since the late ’90s, but they’ve never done a duo recording. It’s Hard For Me To Say I’m Sorry is a sumptuous exercise in subterfuge. The name of the album and each side-long track promises to wallow in the ache of dubious relationship decisions and unmet need, but titles are criticisms of the unhealthy emotional practices enshrined in pop music that have little to do with these two pieces of sonic immersion and textural exploration.
The distorted, shimmering sound world proposed by My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and perfected on Fennesz’s Endless Summer is used here as a gorgeous façade behind which endless layers of processed guitars recede like ocean waves reaching for the horizon.
—Bill Meyer
