fenn o'berg (fennesz, o'rourke, rehberg)

Magic & Return

*Two absolutely classic albums from Fennesz, Jim O'Rourke and Peter Rehberg in one gorgeous repackaged set, plus bonus material! It doesn't get much better...* Given that Editions Mego recently revisited Jim O'Rourke's splendid I'm Happy, And I'm Singing And A 1,2,3,4, it only seems logical to reissue the Fenn O'Berg material that saw him collaborating with Christian Fennesz and Mego boss Peter Rehberg (aka Pita). This double-disc release should serve as a re-introduction to the laptop trio, who are set to make a return early next year with a brand new studio recording planned. In the interim, we're given the opportunity to rediscover The Magic Sound Of Fenn O'Berg and The Return Of Fenn O'Berg with bonus tracks lifted from the Japanese editions. The former was recorded at various live venues around the globe between 1998 and 1999, while the latter is drawn from just two concerts in 2001 - one at the Centre Pompidou, the other at a Viennese jazz club. While the first album has a sense of rawness and spontaneity about it, full of gleefully erratic DSP scrapes and plunderphonic scatology, the second is a more scrupulously assembled affair, edited over the course of an eight-month period. Despite the extent to which technology has evolved since these glitch odysseys were originally embarked upon, they both remain dazzlingly entertaining: The Return Of... proves to be the most striking of the two, feeling like a more unified body of work than its predecessor. In certain respects Magic Sound feels like a scrapbook of ideas by comparison, launching compositional strategies that would be fully expanded on the follow-up. 'Fenn O'Berg Theme' for instance, takes a John Barry original as its starting point, proceeding to claw and swipe at the source material as it attempts to reveal itself from the clamour. Similarly, 'A Viennese Tragedy' on the follow-up mauls through old recordings of orchestral music while digital distortion and the kind of raw, bitmunching mayhem you just don't tend to hear nowadays devours as much of the string arrangement as it can sink its jaws into. Although you could happily sit this alongside works by Farmers Manual, General Magic and other delights from the Mego discography, The Return Of... is at times just as closely matched with something like Michel Chion's Requiem as it is with frenzied, irreverent noise music. Classic material, and an absolutely essential purchase.