Fenn O'Berg - Biography
The artists surrounding the Mego label during the end of the 1990s are responsible for some of the most radical electronic music in the history of the form. Some of the first musicians to employ mobile laptop computer music setups, artists like Pita, Fennesz, General Magic and Farmers Manual mined an abstract musical territory that blended post-techno throb and grainy ambience with seething digital noise and the techniques of improvised music to create a new sonic language. Pita, aka Peter Rehberg, and Christian Fennesz would go on to record genre-defining albums like Seven Tons For Free and Endless Summer, both exploring a texturally dense, euphoric kind of digital abstraction. American musician Jim O’Rourke, who has been exploring experimental music of almost every stripe since the late ‘80s, weighed in with his gorgeous statement on computer music I’m Happy, and I’m Singing, and a 1, 2, 3, 4 released on Mego in 2001.
These three albums stand as highwater marks for the glitch, laptop, post-ambient, computer music genre that Mego practically defined at the beginning of the new millennium. Naturally the three musicians came together to perform at venues around the world sometime around ‘97. Calling themselves Fenn O’Berg, the trio worked with laptops to process samples and electronically generated sounds in real time, improvising with an emphasis on loose structures, lushly innovative textures and a warped sense of humor.
With the prominence of laptops in live performance now, from indie rock to techno, it’s easy to forget that a concert featuring three guys sitting behind computers was virtually unheard of in ’98. As Fenn O’Berg toured in ’98 and ’99, generating the source material that would make up its first album, the group was undoubtedly breaking new ground, setting the stage for live computer music.
In ’99 Mego released The Magic Sound of Fenn O’Berg. Just as the live shows did, the album eschews the seriousness that characterizes the solo records of both Fennesz and Pita, as well as O’Rourke’s experimental music, in favor of a chaotic, loose sound that revels in oddly placed samples and playful bursts of digital noise. The tracks are all edits of music made in real time and the music’s structure is more akin to improvised music’s organic ebb and flow than a formally composed work of electronic music. Rehberg’s harsher noise leanings vie for space with Fennesz’s melodic approach while O’Rourke seems to exhibit the humor with peculiar juxtapositions.
As all three musicians continued their fruitful and compelling solo careers, the next Fenn O’Berg album would come three years later. 2002’s The Return Of Fenn O’Berg is sourced from concerts performed in ’01 in Paris and Vienna. If the opening track shocks with its propulsive near-techno opening, the music soon hits familiar ground as it dissolves into granular drones and swirling ambience. On this album the trio seem to be hitting a stride as the pieces here are longer and more coherent than on the debut. There seems to be less a clashing of styles with a stronger focus on unified texture and structure. Overall the record is more melancholy and more traditionally ambient, featuring some truly beautiful passages of processed orchestral samples and glimmering atmospheric drift.
As the 2000s progressed, O’Rourke turned his focus largely to songwriting and producing and Fennesz’s music seemed to grow more serious. Rehberg continued to work mostly in the realm of noise music as well as managing Mego. The initial excitement surrounding computer improvisation shifted to interest in production techniques and home studios. Fenn O’Berg was on hiatus.
In 2009 Mego, rechristened Editions Mego, released Magic & Return. The compilation collects both Fenn O’Berg full-lengths as well as some outtakes from the time. The music stands up very well, at times astonishing the listener that it was recorded live. Upon the release rumors spread that the trio were considering a reunion and this proved to be true with the release of 2010’s In Stereo. The group’s first album in almost nine years its also the first studio album. Recorded over a week in a Tokyo studio, the trio has crafted a detailed album of electronic ambience. Boasting a broader sonic palette than before, featuring analog and digital synthesis, bass, piano, guitar and percussion, In Stereo sounds like a much more mature version of Fenn O’Berg. The music does retain that swirling, psychedelic ambience that colored the best parts of the trio’s early work, but by expanding its aesthetic the group move beyond the point in time that brought these artists together.
