Hotel Paral.lel wasn’t the first music Fennesz made or released, by any means – there was an earlier EP, Instrument, and he’d been guitarist in the group Maische for a few years already, releasing two albums with them in the early nineties. But this album – one of the earliest on the Mego label – hit with the force of new discovery. If Fennesz was aligned with the digital deconstructionism taking over electronic music at the time, he stood out as one of the most poetic, considered, and melodic of the then-nascent meta-genre. His ability to wrangle glitched-out texture into curious forms was pasted across Hotel Paral.lel, from the simmering hiss of “Sz” to the hum and purr of “Santora” and “Dheli Plaza”; elsewhere, riffs splinter into shards while a 4/4 beat thuds away (“Fa”), and lovely, luminous guitar caresses the cochlea with micro-melodies (“Aus”). An early triumph.