Christian Fennesz, at the very frontier of contemporary music, is a meticulous laptop conceptualist who weaves tangible melodies and glowing guitars through dense, symphonic electronica. His fourth studio album, Venice, finds “laptop” music at a crossroads between its early status as a digital subculture and the question of its sustainability — the feeling that there has to be something more, an emotional quality that rises above the roar of Powerbooks and musical deconstruction and moves towards melody and rapture. Venice was recorded on location in the summer of 2003 and assembled and mixed at Amann Studios, Vienna in January and February 2004. On the record, Fennesz’s guitar playing comes to the fore. His vision of pop idioms interacting with more abstract compositional structures is more distinctive than ever.