Pita


(Copyright © 2003 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )

Pita: Seven Tons For Free (1996), 7/10
Pita: Get Out (1999), 7/10
Pita: Get Down (2002), 6.5/10
Dach: Stereoctypie (2005), 6/10
Rehberg & Bauer: Fasst (1997), 6/10
Rehberg & Bauer: Ballt (1999), 5.5/10
Rehberg & Bauer: Passt (2001), 5/10
Pita: Get Off (2005), 6/10
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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.

(Copyright © 2003 Piero Scaruffi | Terms of use )
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