Fenn O’Berg In Stereo

After a hiatus of almost 9 years the legendary trio of Christian Fennesz, Jim O’Rourke and Peter Rehberg have returned with a new studio album.

Technically the first studio album as previous releases were edits of live performances. They spent a week in Studio GOK Sound, Tokyo to lay down some stunning electronic works. Whereas previously the emphasis was on a chaotic blend of found samples mangled through their mobile computing systems to create a humorous oddball sound, ‘In Stereo’ implements a more wider instrumental palette of analogue & digital synthesis, guitar, piano, bass and percussion. What they do maintain is the ability to make a near psychedelic audio blend where its impossible to determine who does what.

Part I (Extract)

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Released as CD digipack and gatefold double vinyl which features an extra slice of classic Fenn O’Berg magic beauty.
‘In Stereo’ …for you.

Track List:

Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part I
Part VII
Part VI
Part II (vinyl only)

Written and performed by Christian Fennesz, Jim O’Rourke & Peter Rehberg
Recorded and mixed at Studio GOK Sound, Tokyo, October 2009
Mastered at Piethopraxis, Köln, December 2009

Photos by Shunichiro Okada (Outside) & Ujin Matsuo (Inside)

Boomkat Review:

We’ve been waiting for this one for so long – the return of Fennesz, Jim O’Rourke and Peter Rehberg with their first new full length in 8 years, and the first to be conceived and recorded as a studio album. Easily one of the greatest records of its kind we’ve heard in a long long time…

For any electronic music enthusiast, this has to be one of the year’s most feverishly anticipated new releases. Reconvening for the first time on record since 2002′s The Return Of Fenn O’Berg, Christian Fennesz, Jim O’Rourke and Peter Rehberg return as one of the avant-garde’s foremost supergroups; an assembly of extreme computer music, if you will. ‘In Stereo’ has the distinction of being the trio’s first entirely studio-bound enterprise (the group’s first two albums were constituted from live edits), recorded and composed over the course of a week spent at Studio GOK Sound in Tokyo. Perhaps in part because of their more formal surroundings, the three artists incorporate an array of instruments that transcend the laptop-generated sample-munching chaos of their earlier work, and ‘In Stereo’ has the feel of a more serious undertaking because of that.

Don’t be too alarmed by that statement, however; despite the absence of mauled John Barry themes and glitch pyrotechnics this time around, ‘In Stereo’ has the feel of a more in-depth interrogation of electronic sound, divided into six discreet tracks, each with its own elusive, perilously unnavigable internal logic when it comes to structuring. There’s a great deal of information to be devoured at any given moment, and each piece exhibits considerable density and rate of change – seemingly every molecule of ‘Part VII’ is continually collapsing and rebuilding itself – but compositionally, it’s heavy-going. Seductively so, at that.

The album draws much of its character from its oblique slipperiness and restless state of flux; it’s actually incredibly difficult to latch your ear to any one of these tracks, and even after a few listens they retain an unyielding resilience to easy consumption. At no point during ‘Part I’, for example, do you imagine the track is about to erupt into a flurry of crisply engineered, processed drumming and piano treatments, and yet from out of nowhere it does just that before abruptly coming to a halt at the command of some surging glitches.

Fusing the timeless idiom of analogue signal generation with the more unstable language of cutting edge digital synthesis is key to the trio’s work here, and rarely do you hear so happy a marriage of old and new technologies as on ‘Part VI’, which finds classic, bloopy synth articulations simmering alongside streams of rapacious granular techniques in perfect disharmony.

Living up to the weight of expectations, ‘In Stereo’ is ferociously experimental and wonderfully addictive, exhibiting a creative kinship with composers from Francois Bayle to Curtis Roads, right through to the trio’s peers like Keith Fullerton Whitman and labelmate Florian Hecker. A necessary acquisition, we’re sure you’ll agree. Boomkat

Purchase from Editions Mego here

Purchase from Experimedia here

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