At the ManiFeste festival, a tribute to Peter Rehberg, figure of the electro avant-garde

The multidisciplinary IRCAM festival pays tribute this June 14 and 15 to the flair of the musician and British artistic director of Mego, a major label of the experimental scene.

OYou get bored quickly in Vienna. At the beginning of the 1990s, while raves and electronic music were burgeoning all over Europe, some people already wanted to go beyond techno. In the small music scene of the Austrian capital, a group of dissatisfied people is formed around the Club Duchamp evenings, organized at the Blue Box by the Briton Peter Rehberg (1968-2021), alias Pita, a DJ and musician brimming with ideas and ideas. of musical culture — to which ManiFeste-2024 will pay tribute through two concerts. There are in particular Ramon Bauer and Andi Pieper, two geeks eager for computer experiments who form the duo General Magic, Peter Meininger or the guitarist Christian Fennesz, who comes from post-rock and industrial music. They began by collaborating in another club, U4, next to the General Magic studio. In the small room where Peter Rehberg plays, they dig a hole in the wall to run cables, thus mixing the former’s records with the latter’s electronic oddities.

One evening news comes to them “stupid idea”, as Ramon says: compose a record with refrigerator sounds. It will be FridgeTrax in 1995, the first release from the newly formed Mego label — for “My Eyes Glaze Over”, a hacker expression for indicating that one has spent too much time in front of the screen. In this moment when the eyes no longer respond, “anything can happen, and that was the philosophy of the label”, confides Christian Fennesz, author of the fourth release of Mego, Instrument, and the masterpiece Endless Summer in 2001.

Peter’s secret

At the start of the new millennium, the music industry is seeing its model shattered with the arrival of high-speed Internet, and the small business that is Mego, which has launched an online record store and an agency. booking, is no longer viable. Decision was made to leave Peter Rehberg as sole master on board. In 2006, he transformed Mego into Éditions Mego and launched a new era with artists like Stephen O’Malley, from Sunn o))), with whom he formed KTL, or the Americans Emeralds, John Elliott’s group, with whom he brings the Spectrum Spools sub-label into orbit. In 2010, he spotted the talent of Oneohtrix Point Never before anyone else, whose album he released Returnal.

The label gained prominence in the United States, Japan and European experimental scenes until Rehberg’s sudden death at age 53. The producer leaves behind an impressive discographic legacy, several hundred releases in very varied genres ranging from electroacoustic music to metal, synthwave, drone, ambient… “Éditions Mego has released acoustic guitar records, modular synthesizer records… So many very different styles. It’s mysterious but, in a way, they’re all connected. It was Peter’s secret, summarizes Christian Fennesz.

My Eyes Glaze Over (Mego label): a tribute to Peter Rehberg, concerts with Christian Fennesz, Tujiko Noriko, Grand River, Abul Mogard, Center Pompidou, Grande salle, June 14 at 8 p.m.; with Didem Coşkunseven and Caterina Barbieri, Ircam, Espace de projection, June 15 at 10 p.m.