Tonight, on a very special episode of Pitchfork Roundtable, a discussion about Austrian electronic label, Mego. Sitting in for Dick York is Dick Sargent, for Valerie Harper is Sandy Duncan, and for everyone else, Mister Ted McGinley.
Ted: Thanks for reading the bottom review, folks. Let's get things started with the topic which must be on everybody's mind: As they near the ten year mark, when exactly did Mego stop putting out stimulating, quality computer music that showcased international artists and set their ideas in the best light? Starting with the man introduced in television series Bewitched with little or no explanation, Dick Sargent. Dick, when did Mego jump the shark?
Dick: Well, Ted, I'm going to go with the highly ambitious but ultimately impenetrable and boring Farmers Manual RLA DVD set, compiling nearly four days worth of audience fuckery audio files, all live. Christ, there were MP3s on that over three hours long! What were they thinking? Didn't they realize what this technology would mean to Phish-heads?
Sandy Duncan: Well, any label that releases a Jim O'Rourke CD is sending a warning sign. Creatively, it screams, "We are grasping at straws."
Ted: Excellent point, Sandy. Incidentally, Sandy Duncan heads up the new season of the recently renamed hit show, The Hogan Family, on NBC this fall. Now, Mego's most recent release is Semi Peterson by the Swedish group Sluta Leta. Or at least, they were Swedish until this release, when all the original members were replaced by Mego employees General Magic and Gerhard Potuznik.
Dick: This is a bad sign right off the bat. While General Magic put out an endearing, whimsical title early in the Mego label's storied catalog, their follow-up, Rechenkönig, was just not fun. And Potuznik's CD on the label was held back for years, an obvious stinker right out of the gate.
Sandy: The 12-inches Sluta Leta put out on Mego, Cheap, and Chocolate Industries were lively, but I don't know if I should be commending the Swedes or the Austrians. Either way, this time, the record is named after a Swedish race car driver from the 70s, Ronnie Peterson.
Ted: That's right, Sandy, they called him "The King of Drift" back in the day. Similarly, this disc is all over the place, causing horrendous accidents left and right. It starts with those damned digital skips that have become so routine, neither brutal enough to become the point nor long enough to be anything more than something left on the hard drive floor. That is, given that hard drive's don't have floors, per se...
Dick: "Forests of the Moon" can't figure out what to do with its boom-tick, opting for faceless new-wave voice-overs, while "Smakfull Basmusik" can only muster up the most inane of stuttering canned beats, which it vomits up over and over and over again. It's too bad, as most of drummer DD Kern's peppy beats could power the thing alone. "Yea Song" is fun for its two-minute drive time, but that's before they decide to return to the gimpy glitches with "Flash". There's no hope of the disc getting steady after that.
Ted: The noises themselves show that they're just not trying. That rubberband bass sound they resurrect on "Vissna Bort", while invoking all that is unholy, isn't as awful as the karaoke crooning that accompanies it.
Sandy: The guest vocals are truly abysmal, be they by the Austrians or their friends. Remember, when you have guests on, or any special episodes, or you adopt a new child-character, that's a definite "red flag" for far deeper problems. "Super Swede" falls asleep on its digital accordion and programmed bongos while guest vocalist Catriona Shaw crawls through the mess. She makes it up on the backing vocals to "Förjaga", but by then it's much too late.
Ted: Agreed. Maybe it's the writing by committee or something, but no one can figure out a direction, much less finish a track. Nothing is abrasive or abstract enough to work on those terms, and what intends to be danceable gets undercut by its own mischievous production. Sluta Leta, wherever they may be from, can't decide on a decent set of vocals or an ability to turn the half-baked beats into actual pop songs with catchy words.
Sandy: And the surest sign of doom-- be it for television shows, recording groups, or music publications-- is when the writing goes down the tubes. There's no going back then.
