2009 saw some vital reissues hit the racks (the previously covered Afternoon Tea sessions featuring Fennesz and Rehberg being most notable), and the revamping of the Fennesz, Peter Rehberg and Jim O'Rourke outings as Fenn O'Berg, compiling their two recordings The Magic Sounds of and Return of in one delicious, beautifully designed package, remains a watershed moment in early aughts laptop-improv.
Remember that in the late 90s, even in the early 00s, compositional (neé improvisational) laptop careering was a largely peerless domain, despite computers and their subsequent software bundles being reasonably well entrenched in the post-ProTools environments. Laptop "bands" were just coming into their own (such as the big computer ensemble Mimeo, although even they were foreshadowed by pre-laptop brigades such as L.A.'s experimental The Hub) and seemed to exist only within the confines of academia, much less anything approaching the commercial "mainstream." Laptopics still remained the purview of the lone IDMer or post-pubescent geek (check any of the infinite number of sub-Aphex Twin wannabes for reference points), the machine still something of an unwieldy tool with which to posit gleeful noise. Mssrs. Fennesz, O'Rourke, and Rehberg thought otherwise — pioneers of a traditional cyberpunk envisioned a decade earlier by William Gibson, these three to a large extent "legitimized" the laptop as a crucial, vital compositional device. But, rather than running the noise gamut propagated by the likes of, say, Merzbow, the trio ripped the innards out of the machines to expose unlikely juxtapositions of music/non-music, bold reams of texture equal parts whimsy experimentalism, daft sound play, and modulated intent.
Magic is a trio finding its footing, laying the groundwork for labels such as erstwhile, For4Ears, Cut, Ritornell, and scads of others, to eventually forge their own unique interpretations of 'ware-withal. Arcane notions of "melody" are for the most part dispensed with: texture, happenstance and an occasional sense of regularity are paramount. "Shinjuki Baby Part Two" manages to concoct a living playpen out of digital giggles, false starts, adolescent cacophony and scatological squirts, bound together by nimble turns of phrase that somehow congeal into an "other music" that's anything but an aloof goof. "Fenn O'Berg Theme" encapsulates the stormy centers that comprise their live performances, digital perambulations that twist notes, churn stomachs, and upset any number of comfort zones, blurring classical/soundtrack samples into desert storms and metallic gulf breezes; these aren't just three stooges fucking around with then fashionable software but instead extolling the virtues of mechanisms and vocabularies being invented literally on the fly.
The Return of is a more brazen bit of angst than their previous work, as if the three were tired of syntax itself and just wanted to revel in the sheer simplistic noise of it all. Not to say that all is chaos in expansion: "Floating My Boat" re-imagines Stockhausen's concrète hymnals by way of topical digitalia, faint whisps of mutant symphony time-stretched to their breaking points. "Riding Again" reveals the trio as true sons of the loop-da-loop era, replacing analog whirligigs with new-fangled software so that every tweak of the mouse (or track pad, as the case might have been) opened up whole new sonic vistas. The fact that a good chunk (if not all) of these recordings were laid down in live settings in front of what must have been dumbfounded audiences makes them that much more integral to improv's post-modern history. And with the laptop now the modern composer's instrument of choice, ten years down the road, it's beginning to and back again.
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Darren Bergstein 2010-02-02
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