Fenn O’berg, Magic & Return

A Fenn O'Berg affair can be intimidating listening. For all the buzzy amniotic bliss of Christian Fennesz' solo recordings, this laptop improv supergroup with cantankerous noisenik Peter Rehberg (a.k.a. Pita, the proprietor of Vienna's Mego label) and the stylistically omnivorous musical polymath Jim O'Rourke is often the opposite of immersive. Their recordings, all live-performance outtakes, are dense, knotty affairs, crosscut with blasts of white noise; the more placid passages are invariably crumpled by digital fists or torn to ragged shreds. Still, more often than not, the music pulls you in.

Magic & Return reissues the trio's two albums so far, 1999's The Magic Sound of Fenn O'Berg and 2002's The Return of Fenn O'Berg, rounding out the set with two previously unreleased cuts, the long, unwinding dronescape "We Will Diffuse You" and the full-on static attack "Adidas Sun Tanned Avant Man." (Pity the track's namesake: given its eviscerating harmonics, the musicians do not hold him in high esteem.) Liner notes tell us that the albums 'material was recorded in places like Paris 'Centre Pompidou, the Viennese jazz club Porgy & Bess and "some old raft floating in Hamburg harbour," but you'd never know it from the music, which sounds like a celebration of the hermetically sealed space of a laptop computer. It's a two-dimensional zone where Raymond Scott-like vibraphones stumble over sheets of grey noise, where flickering oscillations tangle as intractably as telephone cords; the performers 'contributions slide over one another like layers of shale, pulverizing under pressure into a fine, dusty film. The album's highlight is undoubtedly "Fenn O'Berg Theme," which runs John Barry's Moonraker score through a digital sieve to dramatic (and mildly psychotic) effect, but the whole collection is rich with passages that sneak up and grab you by the collar. Its intricacy rewards active listenings, but it's just as enjoyable to leave playing low in the background, occasionally knocking you off balance before moving out of earshot, leaving you only with the sound of three paddles splashing in data.