Sonar Festival, Barcelona, June 1995. Materialising out of the crowd of electronic music hipsters and industry networkers at the daytime trade fair are three unfamiliar figures, two guys and a woman bearing a pile of white pizza boxes. Two of them wear a grey uniform: cotton laboratory peacoats with the word Mego printed on the breast pockets. The third, a man about my own age, with short dark hair, eyes that never settle on one spot, and an indeterminate middle European provenance, wears the same jacket, only the fabric is an electric shade of blue. When he opens his mouth to speak, it’s not the expected Germanic accent, but the familiar tones of South East England.

That was my first encounter with Peter Rehberg, in the year that the Mego label started up in Vienna. The pizza boxes handed over by him and his friends Tina Frank and Ramon Bauer contained white labels of the first three Mego releases, which even back then seemed to emanate from a different place from all the jungle, ‘intelligent’/minimal techno and other forms of electronic music that were currently on the rise. Over beers on that sweltering summer evening I learnt a few things about Peter: that he came from an Anglo-Austrian family (his father originally from Salzburg); he grew up in North London and Hertfordshire; he had lived in Vienna since 1987, having relocated there after failing to get into an English university; he was a massive fan of Sonic Youth, post-punk and industrial music; his own music, under the pseudonym Pita, was made using an Apple PowerBook 520 portable computer. In 1995, that was pretty eye opening.

At that festival and many others afterwards, Peter was a fun person to have around, with a dry humour that was never cruel, a throaty laugh, and a gregarious bunch of mates and drinking buddies. Even in his cups, his innate generosity kept its head. He enjoyed life and he enjoyed music, and each served and intensified the other. Settling in Vienna, a city of culture with a small, unadventurous late 80s music scene, was probably the smartest move he ever made. He was a round peg in a square hole, jammed in and stuck fast. Surrounded by Austrian musicians trying too hard to sound Anglo-American, he suggested restarting the programme, searching for a European timbre using emergent, non-rock technologies.

Mego started in 1995 and Peter was often referred to as its founder, even though he actually came in as a co-worker. As the label was picked up by international media, his native English made him the de facto spokesman, making him the label’s ‘face’. In autumn 1995 I visited their studio/design/admin space in Vienna, where digital files and images of all kinds were being tweaked and throttled in fascinating ways. “We like the idea of playing around with all this apparatus we have,” he said, giving me the tour. “It all breaks, and we don’t really know how it works, and then we twist it around a bit more until it sounds good. Because we’re not musicians, we’re not scared to use these sort of things.”

Noise, for Peter, was a zone he could casually step into and out of at will. DJing at the city’s Blue Bar, he soused the room in a spume of atonal squarewaves and glitches, working his decks and laptop with the insouciance of an Ibiza chill-out jockey. Drinkers seemed happy to sip fizzing lagers and luminous curaçaos while immersed in this auditory cone of power, whose physicality seemed enough to ward off mediocrity and cliche.

By no means all of Peter’s music was awkward and angular: like his old friend Fennesz, he was excited by the idea of a glowing melody smouldering deep in the fractures. He cared too deeply about music to over-intellectualise it. Unlike many electronic producers of his generation, slathering each new LP in rhizomatic dialectics, Peter didn’t have much to say. He was a worker, a drone, an artisan: he got up, got out, got in and got on with the job.

Like all pioneers, Peter identified where the unbroken ground lay and seized his moment to claim it. His contribution to the first phase of Mego was vital, assisting its ten year growth from tiny outlying start-up to a “global network of lunatics” with a broad and innovative catalogue of around 80 releases. It wasn’t a common sound or philosophy or, perish the thought, commercial viability that defined Mego’s roster, but whether or not the artist’s personality was right. Peter fostered a familial connection between musicians that exploded the tired cliche about electronic musicians being bloodless lab technicians. This stemmed, I am convinced, from Peter’s very English clubbability and whimsical humour. Mego 013, he told me, was a ladder. Beyond the clearly superstitious reasons, the image is hopeful, like the rungs in Snakes and Ladders that help you slide upwards to victory.

It was Peter’s Anglo-Austrian background that made it so easy for him to slip between territories, to make things happen and see a map broader than borders. I think of him as a truly European citizen and artist, fully benefitting from freedom of movement to perform, trade and live across the continent (at various times Vienna, Paris and Berlin were his homes). He delighted in decentralisation, speeded the decline in hegemony of English and American music, and celebrated the emergence of sounds from places like South Korea, Japan, the Nordics and Eastern Europe. “I think it’s really wonderful,” he said. “It’s a small world now: it’s so easy to communicate with people and have a personal in-depth communication with somebody without even meeting them. It doesn’t cost you that much any more. Then once a year you get pissed together in Spain!”

The musical territories he annexed and has left behind form a virtual continent in themselves. The friendships he made and the musical partnerships he developed with Christian Fennesz and Jim O’Rourke in Fenn O’Berg, Stephen O’Malley in KTL, and Marcus Schmickler in R/S, left some of the most challenging and detail-orientated digital musics of the past two decades. His post-2005 reimagining of Mego into Editions Mego, and its branches into Spectrum Spools (synth sounds curated by John Elliott of Emeralds), Old News (Jim O’Rourke’s experimental back catalogue), Ideologic Organ (atavistic electroacoustics from Stephen O’Malley), Sensate Focus (trim digital constructions from Mark Fell of SND), and, eventually, the Recollection GRM and Portraits GRM imprints, allowed his experience and insight to assist others in getting their musics heard and distributed. It took Peter, an enthusiast who totally understood the French avant garde/experimental GRM’s historical importance as well as being a fan of the music, to create the conditions for its archives to see the light of day. With Peter’s guidance, Ina-GRM’s François Bonnet and Christian Zanési were able to channel its history towards the ears of a new audience. As an institution GRM had languished in terms of its communication; Peter tinkered under its hood and jumpstarted it with new, young artists, revitalising it with a sense of purpose in the 21st century.

In his use of the laptop and software applications as sonic tools, and in his early recognition of the internet as a networking device and specialised music marketplace, Peter was, in his quiet, self-deprecating way, technologically ahead of the curve. He was neither interested in grandstanding future-shock tactics, nor tech-utopian psycho-babble. “Music has emotion,” he told me once, “of course, because it’s coming from my body, from my spirit; I’m just using my finger to create it. But still I have to tell my finger when to do that, depending on how I feel. I’ve never understood the criticism that machine music has no soul. The machine isn’t really making music itself. Someone has to turn it on. I decide what sound goes into the machine and what happens to that sound. If I’m feeling in a twisted mood I might put it through an effects patch that took two and a half days to download, and when it comes out it’s…” here, he blew a loud raspberry. “That sounds all right! Slap it on the DAT, and it’s done.”

It has been a devastating shock to many who have met him, worked with him and enjoyed the music he has put out there over the past 26 years to hear of his sudden and unexpected death on 22 July. Peter, on behalf of all of us still walking on the ground you broke, thanks for everything you have left behind.

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