The sound of summer is everything from a marketing wet dream for the music industry to something that is personally important for each of us. In this Music Age our lives sometimes seem to be nothing more than compilation albums, from birth to death. There are tracks that say ‘childhood’, ‘first love’, ‘drugs’, friends’, ‘dance’, ‘marriage’ and all the way to that wrap-up ‘funeral’ track. And interspersed with regularity is ‘the sound of summer [insert year here]’.

We’ve all got tracks that say ‘beach’, ‘waves’, ’sunlight’ and ‘warmth’ to us no matter when and where we hear them. I’ve got tracks that were just getting intense radio-play at the time like the Beach Boys ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ when I was ten.

Cher’s ‘Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves’ was on high rotate the summer I lost my virginity. Then there are the self-discovered tracks, like ‘Piha’ that wonderful, sparse, spiralling, cicada-laden piece by German musician Ian Pooley I had on repeat one year, that I used as a time-marker, rolling over as I sunbathed when one play of the track ended and before it began again.

And this year the first of my summer tracks was ‘Bros’ from Panda Bear’s ‘Person Pitch’ album.

It was an accidental discovery. I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Animal Collective. I have always found it odd that ‘Grass’ from Animal Collective’s ‘Feels’ album was amongst my most played tracks when I react to most of Animal Collective albums with either annoyance or a wish they’d put all the great bits together on one track and ditch the rest. When they’re good they’re very good, but when they’re bad, they’re experimental. And I also knew their drummer Noah Lennox had a solo effort going under the name ‘Panda Bear’ but his first album didn’t prepare me for 2007’s ‘Person Pitch’.

The words ‘Sistine Chapel’ and ‘Beach Boys’ are overused in contemporary album reviewing but this was the Beach Boys in the Sistine Chapel. Noah’s sparse minimalist behaviours documented on 2004’s eponymous ‘Panda Bear’, didn’t prepare anyone for this. All of a sudden the Beach Boy’s 1960’s psychedelic harmonised surf merged with Allegri’s Misere and soared with the able assistance of modern recording techniques. Noah might have done it all himself but Noah was choirs…

‘Comfy in Nautica’ might have been the ultimate opening track with its drum-beats of dense sound and vocals that were harmonising in the stratosphere somewhere. ‘Take Pills’ might have been the anthem that modern tri-cyclic anti-depressants had been waiting for. But it was the 12.36 of ‘Bros’ that really got to me. It was a track that developed. It rolled and rotated. Noah’s harmonies with himself swooped and soared.

I played it in the evening when I’d settle down to a cold vodka with the summer day crashing towards sunset over Mt Albert and the overgrown deck of our house. I had it in the warming, clean morning after stumbling home from an all-nighter. Brad Renfro, Sir Edmund Hilary, and Heath Ledger might have died but ‘Person Pitch’ and ‘Bros’ was there in the cluttered evening bouncing towards its climax in the loungeroom with the French doors open to the air… I sunbathed listening to it, sun-stunned thoughts free to follow the music. My skin was touched and I touched others during its multilayered span. I had it in the mid-background when I was drunk and stoned with friends who were all wearing shorts. It is a track that will forever say ’summer 2008′ on replay.

And then, of course, there was M.I.A, ‘Kala’ and ‘Paperplanes’…

I knew Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasa. I found her sometime during a fixation I had with Dizzee Rascal in 2003 or 2004 when I was downloading lots of grime. I loved Wonder and Plan B’s ‘Cap Back’. I had the essential compilations. I liked Wiley. M.I.A’s ‘Galang’ fitted right in. I looked her up. I knew about her Dad the Tamil revolutionary. I knew the refugee status in London. And I knew she was hot. She looked great and that complex accent really worked on some sort of sexual level. And like all great albums on first listen I didn’t like ‘Kala’ on first play.

Then ‘Jimmy’ crept in.

Based on an old Bollywood track ‘Jimmy Jimmy Aaja’ it might have meant a complex of things to Maya from childhood memories and a journalist covering genocide making a pass at her, but for me it was almost a gay love song. But it was ‘Paperplanes’ that really hit home. Best Use of Gun-Shot as a Rhythmic Device. Yoko Ono ‘Walking On Thin Ice’ Award for superb lyrics including that great ‘Radio On’ reference to keep the music historians happy. It was a Twenty-First Century blend of ethnicity, globalisation, cultural reference, politics, and great music writing.

I was disturbing carfuls of middle-aged media-people by demanding, from the backseat, that the radio replay got turned up loud when we were caught in a sweaty Eden Park cricket traffic grid-lock in Sandringham. I was topless at home on hot Saturday nights going ‘bang bang bang bang’ while dancing on the carpet. I was relishing Maya saying ‘wireless’. I was getting off on that sudden dreamy ‘M.I.A/ Third World Democracy/ I’ve got more records than the KGB’ line. I loved the gun-cock and the cash-register ring echoing through the burn of the cloudless afternoons.

But deep, deep, down in the sounds of this summer, underlying everything, linking everything, was Christian Fennesz.

Fennesz’s early works, particularly some of the tracks off Field Experiments 1995 - 2002, had got to me. The sheer discontinuous textures, the white noise fuzz broken into glitches, and the nerve-searing arc-welds of tracks like ‘Menthol’ and ‘Codeine’ were somehow my mental fingerprints as well. They agreed with me. They slotted into my own rhythms as if they were genetically designed for it. Then when ‘Endless Summer’ came along in 2001, it was just the masterpiece I’d been waiting for. Fennesz had taken the structures and the sounds of summer pop, deconstructed them to fragments, and reconstructed them in a new way. At a time when electronica more often means the meanderings of self-obsession, Fennesz gave us ambient glitch-pop.

It was West Coast beaches at sunset. It was the broken and shuffled fragments of modern consciousness listening to cicadas at Anawhata. ‘Endless Summer’ had textured hooks that jumbled and layered the sharpness of perception with the almost-pain of attachment under pouhutakawas. It was beer and BBQs under the invisible uplinks and downlinks of iridium satellites above the Pacific. And it just wasn’t one summer, somehow the music of Fennesz, the later album ‘Venice’, were condensations of all my summers. It was shivered mirages on hot, black sands. It was the vibrations of summer light itself. It was a grey-green maraam-grassed nostalgia made physical in the real scratched and fuzzed tones of life.

We all construct our musical pleasures. Our plays and replays sit a track in the midst of our lives. Music gets associations from us that will forever attach a time and a place to the sound. And in futures to come I know that it will be Fennesz that will ultimately recover all the gone summers, when I was different, when I was younger…