Touch Newsletter #269
While we were making the finishing touches for Philip Jeck’s new recording
for the Touch: Displacing project, we received the terrible news about Peter Rehberg’s death. It’s been difficult to find words. He was one of a kind.
Peter Rehberg
1968–2021
We are faced with countless challenges and threats to what it is to be human and how to retain our humanity is perhaps the biggest of them all, if we survive the threat of climate change presently unfolding.
To have known an eccentric, an outlier such as Peter Rehberg, who died last week at 53, who said and did extreme things with wit and curiosity, reaffirms and strengthens our sense of what is possible. His approach to life created its own unique energy and all who knew him were caught up in the maelstrom. He was funny (“The parthenon – it’s not finished yet!” Also the fabulous marmite story told by his school friend John Eden in The Quietus). The sound of his laughter will be especially missed! He could be fearful (he once endured a sleepless flight to New York, worried he had left the gas on the oven back in Vienna). Peter was certainly a worrier, but he was never dull. He was super smart and the labels he set up were focussed and successful.
Running the Mego label (later Editions Mego) as an artist himself certainly presented challenges (especially with touring), but it gave him a deep insight into what is important to artists and how best to respond to each individual’s needs.
He was hugely underrated as a “non-musician” musician. We were due to reissue the three albums he did for Touch with Ramon Bauer on vinyl, but he hadn’t delivered the audio masters yet… What to do…
He touched so many lives. To navigate the many conjunctions between Touch and Mego, the hidden history of how we surfed the ups and downs… The many stories, the special artists we have worked with. We’ll remember him always.
“Touch: Displacing”
V33:50
Following Touch: Isolation which covered the first lockdown period in the UK, Touch: Displacing is the second subscription project where the focus falls on longer-form compositions, released on a monthly basis over the coming year and featuring artists for whom duration is a key feature of their work. Contributors thus far: Sohrab, Olivia Block, Bana Haffar, Chris Watson, Richard Chartier, Robert Crouch, Geneva Skeen, Carl Stone, John Eckhardt…
Philip Jeck
“This is the Hour of Lead-”
“This is the Hour of Lead-” was made with Emily Dickinson’s poem, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes-” (1862?) in mind, from which the title comes.
Sleeve notes: (with apologies to Ralph J. Gleason)
“for all our smiles and grit, this feels like a country
with sadness infecting its soul… all those bittersweet late nights
with notes of hopeless love grown cold… who can interpret,
sad not maudlin… gain dignity by slow shedding of tears…”
Photography and design by Jon Wozencroft.
Mastered by Denis Blackham.
Subscribe to Touch: Displacing
Guerrilla Audio
Guerrilla Audio is a series of audio raids by Simon Fisher Turner.
guer·ril·la
ɡəˈrilə/
noun
noun: guerilla
a member of a small independent group taking part in irregular fighting, typically against larger regular forces.
Each audio edit will be posted for 14 days and then removed from the site, although the information about each guerrilla activity will be archived, but without the audio. There will be two postings per month with the first (also featuring Klara Lewis & Rainier Lericolais) on 1st August 2015, so please check in regularly to listen to the latest offering. We are well into the fifth year and have just posted episode 144…
Guerrilla Audio
www.simonfisherturner.com
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