Listening to Cendre after returning again to Sala Saint Cecilia, their EP from 2005, affirms that the two records couldn't be more different. The latter was a single live 19-minute track that found Sakamoto inhabiting the abstract digitalia we've come to associate with Fennesz, directing his diverse talent toward epic computer-based composition. Cendre feels like a meeting of equals occurring precisely halfway between the two.  Full text...

This is not an album that requires the constant attention of the listener; most of the sounds here are meant to be felt, not heard.   Full text...

The album as a whole isn’t really a failure, it just doesn’t quite add up to the sum of each artist’s potential.   Full text...

If Cecilia seemed like Fennesz's monster, then Cendre (French for ash) is Sakamoto's response and necessary coda. Posing the question of what to do when there is nothing left to burn, Cendre ventures cautiously into an apocalyptic ambience.  Full text...

This is definitively an emotional music, built of expressive and subtly ponderous layers with able and careful hands, and, like the foreshadowing offered by its title, ultimately reduced to the nothingness of ash - created and destroyed, with only the unidentifiable rubble of ruin to prove that it ever existed in the first place.   Full text...