Peter Rehberg died of a heart attack late last week, without warning, at age 53. In the future history of electronic music, the Editions Mego founder’s sudden absence will be felt as a stark before and after, like evidence of a devastating forest fire scarred into the rings of a tree.
It is hard to think of another experimental label of Editions Mego’s stature; it’s impossible to think of one with quite the same character—by turns anarchic, serious, and tender. Editions Mego and its predecessor, Mego, are no strangers to difficulty: Recordings by Russell Haswell and Florian Hecker can be terrifyingly loud, bewilderingly arrhythmic, and evisceratingly harsh. Yet Mego also gave the world records like Fennesz’s Endless Summer, Emeralds’ Does It Look Like I’m Here?, and Oneohtrix Point Never’s Returnal—classics noted for their broad appeal and welcoming, even sentimental, warmth. Paradoxical as it may sound, Mego holds a central place on the fringes.
Though unfailingly adventurous, Mego often demonstrated an unusual ability to connect with a wide swath of listeners. Its biggest releases invariably pushed electronic music forward, while its most extreme records gnawed away at the edges of possibility, creating the preconditions for fundamental shifts down the line. Editions Mego could be easy to take for granted, in part because its output was so vast—Rehberg put out well over 400 records in the past 26 years—and many of its artists were unfamiliar names to all but the most clued-in followers of underground music. It kept a low profile and scorned the idea of anything as predictable as a signature sound. Rehberg himself typically stuck to the background, letting his artists’ music speak for itself.
The label’s history stretches back to 1995, when Rehberg joined his friends Ramon Bauer, Peter Meininger, and Andreas Pieper in establishing Mego, which burrowed into the deepest subterranean levels of Vienna’s dance-music scene. (Rehberg grew up in England but later moved to Austria, where his father was from.) The context was an unruly milieu where raving spilled into novel digital technologies and a nascent internet culture; they had one foot in late-night dives and another in publicly funded arts organizations.
Their first record, released as General Magic (Bauer and Andreas Pieper) & Pita (Rehberg), was 1995’s Fridge Trax, a white-label 12" of ambient drones and minimalist pulses sourced almost entirely from recordings of refrigerators—a provocative rejoinder to the dominant four-to-the-floor techno of the time in Europe. But rather than being merely ironic or condescending, Fridge Trax was a powerful and engrossing piece of post-industrial music that paved the way for everyone from Matthew Herbert to Matmos.
Rehberg was no stranger to clashing dichotomies: A buyer at a techno record store when he founded the label, he had grown up on iconoclastic groups like Cabaret Voltaire, Swans, and Big Black. “Loads of people I know don’t come from any sort of dance-culture scene,” he told me in 2002. “Especially in America, it’s punk rock or disco. You can’t be both. Even though I like both. If you want to give an American an idea of what Mego is, you just say it’s punk-rock disco.”
After Mego shut its doors in 2005, Rehberg reincarnated the label the following year as Editions Mego, quickly surpassing the original imprint’s output in both number and scope. In 2011, to pick one particularly fruitful year, he released hyper-minimalist techno from Mark Fell, new-age psychedelia from Emeralds’ Mark McGuire, solo reissues from Wire’s Bruce Gilbert, head-spinning noise from Haswell and Hecker, and, most bewilderingly, two albums of skewed acoustic blues from improvising guitarist Bill Orcutt.
Just as importantly, Rehberg launched a number of sub-labels that further expanded Editions Mego’s range. With his frequent collaborator Stephen O’Malley, of Sunn O))), he created Ideologic Organ, an imprint specializing in various forms of extreme music. Following Emeralds’ pivotal 2010 album Does It Look Like I’m Here?, he invited the trio’s John Elliott to launch Spectrum Spools, focused largely on American experimental electronic music. And with Recollection GRM, he performed an essential public service by reissuing dozens of out-of-print titles from Groupe de Recherches Musicales, the pioneering French electro-acoustic research center founded by Pierre Schaeffer in 1958.
For all of its forward-thinking dynamism, Editions Mego’s output is also marked by an essential sense of humanity: Few experimental labels tap a well of feeling as deeply as Editions Mego could. After hearing of Rehberg’s death early in the morning last Friday en route to the airport in Portland, I loaded up my phone with Editions Mego titles for the 24-hour journey ahead of me, to Menorca, Spain. (For Spotify users, this playlist, nearly 2000 songs long, is an invaluable resource.) Waiting for takeoff, I listened to Rehberg’s 1999 album under his Pita moniker, Get Out; as my breath escaped from my mask, tendrils of fog streaked across my eyeglasses seemingly in time to the crackling of the music, as though steam and static were rippling in sync. Flying over Alberta, Canada—my late father’s birthplace—I watched the sky grow thick with smoke from forest fires while my ears filled with the sounds of Surgeon’s Transcendence Orchestra, drones so thick you could practically scoop them up with your hands.
These moments felt deeply appropriate to Mego: For all its groundbreaking character, the label’s music is also inextricably entwined with the messy business of living. Rehberg’s taste and curiosity gave us extreme music unusually suited to everyday life—noise music of remarkable intimacy and ambient of thundering force. It is a larger-than-life label on a human scale. And whatever happens to Editions Mego in the wake of Rehberg’s death, it leaves behind an incomparable legacy. Here are nine of the label’s releases that capture the breadth of Rehberg’s vision.
Pita: Get Out (1999)
Rehberg’s early work as Pita harnessed ear-splitting frequencies and seismic rumbles into bracing blasts of noise, but on Get Out, he increasingly let his soft side come to the fore, turning his attention to weightless drones and MBV-grade wall-of-sound chord progressions. “I’m an old romantic,” he said in 2002. “It’s interesting to get something that’s really melancholic or romantic and chuck it through a very cold process and see what comes out. Dissonance only works if there’s some kind of melody involved. There’s too much computer music that loses that human touch.”
Fennesz: Endless Summer (2001)
The term “laptop music” attached itself to Mego in the late 1990s, as computers began turning up on stage; Rehberg hated the phrase, and he found the antidote in the work of Christian Fennesz, a Viennese guitarist from the ’80s alt-rock band Maische. On his first two albums for the label, Fennesz balanced digital glitches and throbbing electronic feedback, generating highly abstracted noise music in keeping with Rehberg’s own solo music. But with 2001’s Endless Summer, Fennesz returned to the guitar and hit upon something else altogether: aquatic burbles, filigreed strumming, and jewel-toned shoegaze blur—an approximation of folk music from the 23rd century.
Fennesz/O’Rourke/Rehberg: The Magic Sound of Fenn O’Berg (1999)
The trio of Fennesz, Jim O’Rourke, and Rehberg came about more or less accidentally, when the three musicians found themselves repeatedly booked at the same jazz gigs. Why not sit in together like jazz musicians? they thought. What began as a lark turned into a series of gigs and then an occasional studio project yielding four studio albums. Their 1999 debut, a putty-like amalgam of warped samples and overdriven electronic squeals, is by turns absurd, brutal, and totally inscrutable. “When people listen to the Fenn O’Berg album they say, ‘That must be what Jim’s doing, and that must be what Pita’s doing, and that must be what Fennesz is doing,’ but it’s always completely reversed,” Rehberg said in 2002. “We play with people’s perceptions of what exactly we are doing.” They played with audience perceptions in another way, too: Arriving at precisely the moment that pre-millennial experimental music was at risk of disappearing up its own ASCII, the album served as a crucial reminder that electronic music could also be fun, silly—even nonsensical.
Tujiko Noriko: Shojo Toshi (2001)
If a whiff of menace hung over early Mego releases from artists like Fuckhead, Zbigniew Karkowski, and Merzbow, Tujiko Noriko’s work sounded, in contrast, like sunshine distilled. She came to the label after handing Rehberg a demo cassette with a hand-drawn cover, and her debut release for Mego, 2001’s Shojo Toshi, had a similarly homespun air, mixing lo-fi synthesizer and skeletal electronic beats with airy vocal melodies. The whole album radiates pure, childlike joy.
Kevin Drumm: Sheer Hellish Miasma (2002)
Somewhere between Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music and Scandinavian black metal lies Kevin Drumm’s Sheer Hellish Miasma, a wide-eyed journey into the glories of feedback and the ecstasy of sustain. Created with guitar and an array of pedals, microphones, tapes, and analog synthesizers, it’s a study in extremes: Where “Turning Point” and “The Inferno” resemble jackhammers, the closing “Cloudy” is among the most bucolic pieces in the ambient canon.
KTL: KTL (2006)
Today, the fusion of doom metal and ambient music is old hat, but in 2006, when Rehberg teamed up with Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley to form the duo KTL, listeners on both sides of the aisle were far more likely to look askance at the unholy union of electric guitars and electronic gizmos. Born of the duo’s soundtrack work for choreographer Gisèle Vienne and novelist and playwright Dennis Cooper, KTL’s debut album pairs O’Malley’s bee-swarm guitar drones with the high-end fizz of Pita’s digital sandblasting; it’s hard to say which sound is more evil. Smoldering like the aftermath of a house fire, the results are unsettling yet strangely enveloping.
Oren Ambarchi: Hubris (2016)
Australian percussionist and electronic musician Oren Ambarchi has recorded dozens of albums for nearly as many labels over the years, but much of his best work has turned up on Editions Mego. Even for an artist who has made collaboration a central part of his practice, Hubris stands out: Incorporating contributions from Jim O’Rourke, crys cole, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Mark Fell, and Ricardo Villalobos, the 40-minute album seamlessly blends together krautrock, minimal techno, folk, and free jazz.
Caterina Barbieri: Ecstatic Computation (2019)
Compared with the lacerating frequencies and dense thickets of noise common to many Mego releases, Caterina Barbieri’s debut for the label is a paragon of simplicity. The Italian synthesist works with arpeggiated patterns by turns trim and fluid; the magic is in the way she makes them move, morphing constantly over time, so that no two bars are the same. The music just keeps cycling upward without ever reaching its peak, like an Escher-designed staircase leading to the promise of rapture.
KMRU: Peel (2020)
Joseph Kamaru’s 2020 album Peel emerged as one of the label’s unexpected breakout hits. The pandemic may have had something to do with that: The Kenyan ambient musician’s shimmering blend of field recordings and ambient drones felt particularly well suited to a year spent stuck inside and suspended in disbelief. But Peel, which incorporates softly churning pulses that turn up in other Editions Mego highlights, like Thomas Brinkmann’s What You Hear (Is What You Hear), also stands as evidence of the ability Rehberg had to hear what others couldn’t, or wouldn’t. When I interviewed Kamaru this spring, he told me that of all the label heads he sent his demo to, Rehberg was the only one to respond.
