Though he’s been making music since the mid-’90s, Peter Rehberg is still a bit of a cult figure. It’s not too hard to understand why. A pioneer of laptop-based music that was at turns abrasive and sublime, the Austrian producer’s early records could be a bit intimidating, even alongside the work of experimental-minded peers like Jim O’Rourke, Fennesz, and Kevin Drumm. And it also doesn’t help that the last album released under his most prolific alias, Pita, came out more than a decade ago. Yet, it’s hard to think of anybody whose work—both as an artist and a label owner—has remained more deeply embedded in the DNA of contemporary electronic and out-there music.
Founded in the mid-'90s, Rehberg’s label, Mego, released computer music that defied classification, existing outside of terms like “dance” or “ambient.” The label’s most enduring releases – Fennesz’s Endless Summer, O’Rourke’s I’m Happy and I’m Singing, Drumm’s Sheer Hellish Miasma – made digitally mulched sounds register as dense and organic. That label’s Rehberg-run successor, Editions Mego, has proven equally influential, releasing records that helped establish American Kosmiche nobility like Emeralds, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Keith Fullerton Whitman. And that’s not even counting Editions Mego’s multitude of artist-curated sub-labels, which include Spectrum Spools (Emeralds’ John Elliott), Recollection GRM (curated by François Bonnet and Daniel Teruggi), Ideologic Organ (Stephen O'Malley), and Old News (Jim O’Rourke). You can also hear traces of Rehberg’s gritty sound design in releases on edgier contemporary dance labels like Trilogy Tapes and PAN. He even beat Matmos to the household appliance thing by two decades.
Get In is Rehberg’s first release as Pita since 2004’s Get Off and it picks up more or less where its predecessor left off. The sound design is cleaner and richer in detail, but the same rules apply. It is a record defined by not-so-subtle shifts in volume and intensity. Serene drones give way to rubbery atonal squelch. Familiar tones are dissected and decimated. On “S200729” the burble of a TB-303 bassline – the defining sound of acid house – is digitally deconstructed from a warm analog burble into the kind of sound that could bust up asphalt.
Attitude was a key to Pita’s first records: They were loud and rude. The music might lull you into a false sense of security only to turn around and fry your eardrums. However, Get In is more gripping in its meditative moments. On “Line Angel” glimmering keyboard tones are periodically interrupted and skewed out of tune, dive-bombing from soothing to seasick. “Mfbk” is more earnest, ascending in volume to reveal generative melodies and cello-like tones that evoke Brian Eno’s Discreet Music. If you’re a long-time Pita listener, you might keep the volume low, just in case a shocking blast of fuzz is imminent. The punishment never comes, though.
The tools that are used in its creation define so much about electronic music – it’s utility, it’s time and place. Rehberg’s process has always been a bit mysterious, though. It’s the product of a set of programs, rather than a table full of boxes and knobs. In concert, the back of a laptop screen obscures his moves, and it’s harder to date his records as a result. Get In was recorded last year, but it sounds like it could have been made at any time over the intervening decade. There are no melodic clichés to give it away and no organized rhythms. The sounds are proto-human, primeval and timeless.
