It’s impossible to let Liminal States flood your ears and brain without thinking about the artist that made the music. A lengthy and abstracted, spacious electronic composition created in 2018 by Peter Rehberg, who would sadly and suddenly, only 3 years later, say goodbye to all of us.
At a cruelly early 53 years old, the wound of Rehberg’s passing has never really healed. Whilst we didn’t personally know him, to be able to separate the man from his rich discography means Pita, as he was regularly known, is still very much present here at OBLADADA.
Liminal States appearing at all would be seismic, but now feels particularly powerful. Even with no emotional bias, it might just be the most stunning piece we’ve heard yet from Rehberg. Add the reality and it’s a literal heaving drift through the ether, it’s from beyond the veil, undefinable, on another plane, disorientating, and dreamlike – but not even for a moment, remotely gloomy.
Rehberg was a serial collaborator and as well as a host of other musicians, he worked on several projects with dance and theatre productions. He’d created soundtracks for French artist and choreographer Gisèle Vienne, on albums like Showroomdummies and Work for GV 2004-2008. He also worked with Icelandic choreographer Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir, working on Pervasive Magnetic Stimuli, Boundless Ominous Fields, and now Liminal States.
Previously unreleased, it’s now fittingly part of Rehberg’s label Mego, now called Edition Mego, as they mark their 30th year of stunning, and adventurous electronic music. Composed as a sonic element to whatever might have been performed, Liminal States, on its own, remains devastatingly effective, A single 45-minute-long piece of music focuses in on altered states of perception through what Guðjónsdóttir calls phenomenological embodiment, a way of regarding where our bodies and brains end and the world begins… A study in existence.
How this all informs the music isn’t vitally important, but within seconds, it’s clear sonically we are in jaw dropping territory. Built from blocks of what sounds like sparkling hurdy gurdy and a rippling bed of electronics, the whole thing surges forward, like surfing the wave at the very edge of a galaxy, as it expands.
Some 15 minutes in, the drone slowly fragments, tears, revealing edges and chasms, rising and falling. The illusion of static whilst nothing is staying still. 10 minutes later, the music is folding in on itself as huge forms tumble and warp in deep cavernous space. The more familiar this world begins to feel, the stranger it somehow gets, wobbling shimmering forms gather, hallucinations, as the idea this will ever become in anyway graspable, dissolves.
Eventually the music leads to a huge nebula, drawn out in huge smeared and shadowy drones before congealing into a brighter form. In the final moments, a glimpse or memory of a choir, a piano or sitar, somehow forming the first woozy sense of anything you may consider remotely earth based.
It’s easy to retrospectively regard Liminal States as an epitaph to Rehberg, the music and ambition fitting perfectly as a tribute from beyond. But as always with his music, you get this sense the music is always just hugely fluid and endlessly suggestive. He’d always delighted in blending the beautiful and the ugly, and finding some sort of commonality in both. Here, he’s only dealing in stunning.
Liminal States is an album that reminds us of Jim O’Rourke’s Happy Days, Rafael Toral’s Spectral Evolution, and is littered with sounds that aren’t a million light years from Roland Kayn’s sonic palette. Heavy weight references for sure, but the deepest possible compliments we could offer that outline how hard, often and effectively this has hit.
Liminal States is an unexpected gift, that possibly eclipses everything else the great man ever did – that we are standing in 2025, and still even thinking such thoughts is truly amazing.
Time again to grieve at the loss, time again to marvel at what we had, and thankfully still have…
Liminal States is released 31st January on Editions Mego on vinyl and as digital download.
obladada.com 