British-born Austrian electronic musician Peter "Pita" Rehberg was in the 1990s one of the pioneers of
dissonant music composed through digital noise.
The oneiric 21-minute composition Mesmer appears on Mesmer Variations (1995), a double-disc album devoted to compositions inspired by 19th-century pseudo-scientist Friedrich Mesmer (the piece was reissued in 2010, coupled with a glitchy remix, on the cassette Mesmer).
Three Compositions for Machines (1997) contains the
17-minute Typewriter Piece, a collaboration with
Mika Vainio.
He contributed to formalize the "glitch" aesthetics with the all-instrumental
Seven Tons For Free (Mego, 1996).
The sonata for pulse signals ~ / is minimal music with no melody, just two steady beats interlaced with a syncopated beat, a hypnosis of stuttering nothingness.
The brief intermezzos can be even more unnerving in their utterly pointless
sophistication, like the slow crackling of ii or the harsh drone of Fehler.
The 14-minute Seven Tons Revised is superficially a hybrid of
droning ambient music and industrial dissonance, but the intersecting and
overlapping hisses and rumbles constitute a new frontier for electronic music,
towards a symphony of droning signals.
Get Out (Mego, 1999) was the cacophonous equivalent of a
romantic symphony.
The sound ranges
from very dense and noisy to subsonic and subliminal, running the gamut
from the shrill agonizing drones of 3:08
to the galactic emptiness of 2:06,
and from the
frantic convulsions o f3:38
to the underwater bubbling of 4:23.
8:50 is simply nine minutes of crackling electronics.
11:19 begins like a melodic instrumental but instead of launching into
a soaring refrain it takes off with a ear-splitting distortion; but the
hymn-like melody is still there, just ferociously distorted. A few minutes
later it undergoes another phase transition into an even more distorted and
fragmented substance.
By comparison, Get Down (Mego, 2002) was a more humane work.
The dense dirty drone of We Don't Need No Music gives birth to
a tinkling music-box.
Iida Denki and
Concrete Raver sound like a cubistic remixes of radio conversations.
43353.rf sounds like a free-jazz duet between two robots.
The industrial vignette Acid Udon has a symphonic quality
that steers it away from the apocalypse.
However, the electric discharge of
Our Pen
and the pounding press of Fine Swex
return to the most visceral moments of the previous album.
The trilogy of collaborations with Ramon "General Magic" Bauer,
Fasst (Touch, 1997), Ballt (Touch, 1999) and
Passt (Touch, 2001), was his most comprehensive exploration of
digital noise, but mostly sounded indulgent and naive.
Pop Album (Tochnit Aleph) documents live performances of electronic noise
with Zbigniew Karkowski.
Afternoon Tea (february 2000 - Ritornell, 2000 - Weird Forest, 2010) was a collaboration among Keith Rowe, Paul Gough (Pimmon), Oren Ambarchi, Peter Rehberg (Pita), and Christian Fennesz that pioneered live hard-disc editing (via Powerbook software) as a new form of collective improvisation.
Stereoctypie (Asphodel, 2005), credited to Dach and featuring a Japanese
vocalist, is one of his most romantic works.
The eight-track mini-album Get Off (Hapna, 2005),
the third installation in Pita's "Get" series (following 1999's
Get Out and 2002's Get Down), is a veehement exercise in
psychological contrast, alternating quasi-silence to bursts of noise, but
the concept hardly sounds revolutionary in 2005.
After a brief overture, Eternal, of tinkling bells and slowly-revolving
celestial drones, that projects the illusion of a calmer, soothing Pita,
the brutal eight-minute modulated crescendo of dissonance of
Like Watching Shit on a Shelf brings back his most unrelenting
visions of the digital apocalypse, sounding like the a horde of agonizing nuclear-damaged monsters.
calm, but not humanity, is briefly restored with Resog 45, that initially
sounds like a dialogue between androids and high-tension wires before exploding
into a machine-gun fire of harsh tones.
The four following tracks are intriguing terror-filled ideas, but Pita does not
take the time to develop them.
The collection thus comes to an abrupt end with the nine-minute Retour,
a high-pitched drone that is rather pointless and uneventful compared with the
four shorter tracks that preceded it.
Only the erratic Pita knows why waste nine minutes that could have been used
to further develop better concepts.
KTL was a collaboration between Pita and
Stephen O'Malley of SUNNO))).
The four compositions of
A Bas la Culture Marchande (2007)
rank among his most chaotic, bordering on
musique concrete and industrial music.
Colchester (2011) was a collaboration between Z'ev and Peter "Pita" Rehberg, the product of a monthly file exchange process in 2005.
Pita's adventures concluded with
Get In (Mego, 2016), which contains the ten-minute Mfbk,
and
Get On (Mego, 2019), which contains the 15-minute Motivation.
Between 2019 and 2020 Pita also released many live albums.
During the covid pandemic Rehberg recorded the
32-minute Piece for AMPLIFY2020 Quarantine Parts I & II (2020).
Peter Rehberg died of a heart attack in 2021 at the age of 53.
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