From the DEI press.. not me.
FENNESZ / O'ROURKE / REHBERG
The Magic Sound Of Fenn O'Berg
MEGO031CD
UPC: 1753-32372-2
Christian Fennesz - Jim O'Rourke - Peter Rehberg (Pita)
Recorded in Tokyo, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna and Paris
With a hardcore attitude and approach to sonic manipulation that equals
peers like Autechre, Pan Sonic, and Merzbow, Vienna's Mego label has been
active at the cutting-edge of digital music culture for the past four years.
Hacking out their own, distinctive audio print, based around abrasive
tonalities, glitches and wrinkles, and skittering, abstract structures,
they operate across a variety of modern electronic media, consistently
pushing and interrogating the technology ñ searching out spikes, cracks and
creative spaces. Like the above-mentioned trio, the visceral grain of the
sound and its placement appear rigorously, obsessively worked. With Mego,
you can literally feel the quality, the difference.
Whilst a bunch of blokes sat ponderously at laptops may be visually dull,
Mego's live shows have always seemed other than mere promotion. Providing
a vital articulation of their NOW-ness, and a head-on engagement, they
become the ground-zero of the labelís activities. Recorded at various
locations over the course of the last year, "The Magic Sound Of Fenn
O'Berg" documents the live collaboration of Pita, Christian Fennesz, and US
ally Jim O'Rourke. Each armed with a powerbook and mixing desk, and
usually little prior knowledge of one anotherís material or intentions, the
results are a stunning flood-and-fold adventure in sound. Of course, the
very nature of improv necessitates periods of boredom, false-starts and
wrong turns. Yet these excerpts generally witness a trio in staggering
form. Whilst all three have delivered superb solo efforts, you get the
feeling that it's perhaps the process itself, rather than finalised form
that inspires them - twisting and pulling, re-working their sonics, getting
off on the "heat" of live collaboration. Dense and dark, murkier and more
disorganised than "Get Out", the live passages draw on a wider sound-world.
Fizzing and flickering, bursting with gritty chatter, all manner of sonic
detritus is pushed through the mangler: twinking glockenspeils, bursts of
piano, overloading bass drones and frequency-fogs, crumbling traces of pop.
When a lengthy section of John Barryís stirring, string-lead "Moonraker"
theme takes the foreground, it works precisely because itís the last thing
your expecting. Not so much a series of new maps, as a doing away with them
altogether, immersing yourself in the freeform thrill of (live) sounds /
events unfolding around you. Wired in, the flow becomes a draining adventure.
Fucking hardcore.
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Pietro Da Sacco, m b m @ n e t c o r e . c a
::: Grooves Magazine 002 :::
::: Experimental Electronica in Words :::
http://www.rain.org/~audio/grooves/
::: Insound.com Zinestand :::
http://www.insound.com/zinestand/grooves/