Mego – MEGO 031 264.66MB FLAC
The Magic Sound of Fenn O’Berg does not behave like three electronic musicians combining their strengths in a tidy collaboration. It sounds more like several unstable systems forced to share one electrical grid. Samples, digital noise, guitar fragments, orchestral traces, pop debris, harsh frequencies, and sudden pockets of near-beauty collide without settling into clear ownership. Christian Fennesz, Jim O’Rourke, and Peter Rehberg do not take turns presenting recognizable signatures. They continually scramble those signatures, making it difficult to determine who introduced a sound, who damaged it, and who decided to let it survive.
The trio formed almost accidentally after appearing together at the Nickelsdorf Festival in 1997. The idea borrowed something from jazz: if musicians repeatedly found themselves on the same bill, why not sit in together? Their instruments, however, were largely portable computers and electronic systems rather than horns or a conventional rhythm section. During 1998 and 1999 they carried that setup through clubs, festivals, galleries, and rooms across Europe, North America, and Japan, often encountering audiences with no established language for what they were seeing. The Magic Sound of Fenn O’Berg was assembled from edited highlights of those performances.
That live origin matters because the record retains the danger of machines being operated in public before laptop performance had become ordinary. Contemporary software makes electronic improvisation appear relatively frictionless, but the late-1990s equipment behind these recordings was less forgiving. Computers stalled, connections failed, and available processing power imposed hard limits. The trio did not hide those conditions. Instability became part of the sound. Glitches could function as mistakes, textures, rhythmic interruptions, or accidental openings into another section.
The album begins with “Shinjuku Baby Pt. 1,” recorded in Tokyo, and immediately treats recognizable material as something temporary. Sounds rise in fragments rather than complete statements. A sampled voice or instrumental phrase may appear clearly enough to trigger recognition, then become stretched, interrupted, or buried beneath electronic pressure. Fenn O’Berg’s humor often lives inside this delay between recognition and destruction. The listener identifies a familiar cultural object just before the trio bends it into something useless for its original purpose.
That process gives the music a collage-like quality, but collage does not fully describe its movement. The pieces are not fixed arrangements of contrasting sources. Materials enter live, collide, and redirect the musicians. A sentimental fragment can provoke abrasive noise. A harsh digital burst may create space for a delicate passage. The three players behave less like editors presenting finished juxtapositions than like people throwing unstable objects into the same room and reacting to whatever survives the impact.
“Steam Powered Oscillation” and “Escape From Hamburg” are extremely short, preserving concentrated bursts rather than complete environments. Their brevity helps the album avoid becoming a continuous hour of shapeless overload. These fragments operate like trapdoors between the longer pieces, opening briefly onto another mechanism before slamming shut. The titles add to the trio’s absurdity, mixing technical language, travel incidents, private jokes, and cartoonish imagery without explaining which is which.
“Horst und Snail mit Markus” moves through damaged tones and awkwardly fitted layers that never quite agree on a common scale. One element may sound microscopic while another appears enormous, producing an unstable perspective. Fenn O’Berg repeatedly makes small electronic events feel architectural. A click, pulse, or digital scrape can become the edge of a room, while a broad sample may be reduced to a thin strip of recognizable information.
The two “Gürtel” pieces were recorded in Vienna and frame another aspect of the group’s method: repetition without dependable rhythm. Sounds recur, but their returns are altered by interruption, processing, or sudden changes in volume. The music can suggest a groove without granting the body enough stability to settle into it. Rehberg’s harsher electronic language, Fennesz’s increasingly melodic treatment of guitar, and O’Rourke’s sensitivity to structure and recorded detail keep sliding across one another.
None of those roles remains fixed. A listener familiar with the three musicians might assume that a luminous guitar-like cloud belongs to Fennesz, a severe digital rupture to Rehberg, or a carefully placed orchestral sample to O’Rourke. The trio deliberately frustrates that identification. Their performances depend upon shared misdirection. Sounds associated with one musician may have been introduced by another, while processing can erase the source completely. Individual style becomes another sample available for manipulation.
“Shinjuku Baby Pt. 2” stretches the Tokyo material into the album’s longest section. Here the trio’s apparent chaos reveals an unusual patience. Abrasion, fragmented melody, and unstable samples accumulate without being rushed toward a conventional climax. Sections emerge through changes in density rather than obvious transitions. A field of noise may thin enough to expose a buried harmonic trace, or a seemingly humorous fragment may remain long enough to become eerie.
The record’s most direct declaration arrives with “Fenn O’Berg Theme,” although the idea of this group possessing a theme is already a joke. Instead of summarizing the trio through one clear motif, the piece continues their method of unstable combination. The title promises identity while the music keeps dissolving it. This contradiction is central to the album. Fenn O’Berg became recognizable precisely because the group resisted establishing a dependable sound.
There is also a strong social quality beneath the electronics. These performances were not created by isolated studio technicians perfecting files alone. They came from touring, shared bills, difficult rooms, audience reactions, technical failures, travel, and the pressure of producing something in real time. Reports from the period describe polarized responses, including situations where promoters and listeners seemed uncertain whether the trio’s sets counted as music, provocation, equipment trouble, or some combination of all three.
That uncertainty gave the group freedom. They could place vulgar noise beside delicate melody, academic electronic technique beside pop sampling, and absurd comedy beside moments of unexpected emotional weight. The record never treats seriousness and humor as opposites. A ridiculous sound can become beautiful through repetition. A beautiful sample can be made ridiculous through interruption. The trio refuses the solemnity that often surrounds experimental electronic music without reducing the work to parody.
The Magic Sound of Fenn O’Berg arrived at the end of a decade fascinated by the possibilities of digital manipulation but still learning how those possibilities might operate in performance. Its computers now belong to technological history, yet the album does not feel trapped by obsolete equipment. The limitations contribute to its personality. Processing has weight, edits have visible seams, and overload feels physically earned rather than selected from a polished menu.
What remains most compelling is the trio’s willingness to lose control without abandoning attention. The music can sound chaotic, but it is not indifferent. Each interruption changes the field, and each player responds by shifting scale, density, or direction. The performances survive because the musicians listen through the confusion.
The album’s “magic” is therefore not technical perfection or mysterious digital wizardry. It is the unlikely coherence produced when three strong musical identities agree to become unreliable. Fennesz, O’Rourke, and Rehberg enter with separate histories and leave behind a collective sound that cannot be cleanly divided among them. Pop memory, electronic violence, melodic residue, malfunction, and comedy pass through the same unstable machine. The result remains funny, abrasive, beautiful, and difficult to map, a live electronic music that keeps changing shape before anyone can decide exactly what it is.
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