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Fenn O'Berg, "In Hell"
As much as I enjoy all of the musicians involved, the recently reincarnated Fenn O'Berg has thus far failed to recapture the deranged magic of their early years for me.  They can still be quite good though (and occasionally surprising).  These recordings from their 2010 Japanese tour share some of the muted, brooding tone of 2010's In Stereo, but also demonstrate that this laptop trio has not entirely abandoned their more wild, spontaneous, and absurdist tendencies.  I'm not sure if that necessarily makes In Hell stronger than its predecessor, but it at least seems a bit more striking and memorable.
In Hell reminds me of the folksy, hackneyed joke "if you don't like the weather in _____, wait five minutes!" due to its unstable, constantly shifting nature.  Despite that endless flux, however, these five pieces evoke an omnipresent mood of uneasiness, coldness, and dislocation that make the album title seem like an extraordinarily apt one.  In fact, one the closest stylistic reference points for Fenn O'Berg at this point seems to be the 20th century classical music avant-garde, as several passages sound queasily and dissonantly Morton Feldman-esque and disruptions by musique concrète-style found sounds are rampant.  Or maybe it just sounds like The Caretaker fed into a malfunctioning blender that turns itself off and on at its own whim.  There are certainly some flashes of humor hidden amidst all the alienation, like the funky and cartoonish vamp at the end of "Vampires of Hondori," but the gravity and dark tone of the surrounding material imbues them with perverse seriousness.
In any case, this album is essentially a simmering stew of minimal and disquieting musical passages constantly being augmented, consumed, or derailed by a host of buzzes, squelches, whines, crackles, bleeps, bloops, crunches, hums, and violent processing changes.  The two shorter pieces ("Omuta Elegy" and "Concrete Onions") seem to somehow maintain a linear arc of sorts, but the lengthier ones tend to end up in a very different place than they started.  The aforementioned "Vampires," for example, veers into space-y synthesizer ambiance, goofy funk, something that sounds like being enveloped by a swarm of digitized birds, an approximation of a lonely violist playing an out-of-tune instrument in hell, and something that sounds like the very fabric of the universe being ripped apart over the course of its 18-minute duration.  There's even some classic rock buried in there too.
For me, Fenn O'Berg's zenith will always be 1999's "Fenn O'Berg Theme," which perfectly blended a smokey, noirish motif with digitized, laptop chaos.  My main issue with the recently reanimated Fenn O'Berg is the absence of any similarly strong themes.  They seem to be "composing" by bouncing ideas off of each other until something coheres rather than gleefully mangling a strong, pre-existing motif.  As a result, their recent work seems to be more sophisticated, uncompromising, and daringly improvised, but the trade-off is that the relative hooklessness and amorphousness make it a less accessible and increasingly self-indulgent affair.  In fact, it's kind of analogous to shifting from bebop to free jazz: there is no decline in inspiration or vision, but it is quite a bit harder on the ears.  Consequently, their appeal for me these days is largely a cerebral one–I am fascinated by how these three unpredictable artists interact with one another and deal with amusing curveballs (like the abrupt appearance of Boston's "More Than a Feeling" in "Christian Rocks"), but I definitely wish there was sturdier structure and melodic content holding it all together.
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