Space is the predominant force behind Showroom Dummies, the latest solo offering from Mego labelhead Peter Rehberg, commonly known as Pita. The album opens with a repetitive string of bleeps punctuating a long chunk of silence. The second (none of the tracks have names) is a pulsating gob of low end and a high-pitched whirr, two loops slightly offset from one another that continue until the listener ceases to pay attention. Eventually, both sounds drop out, there's a minute or so of isolated clicks and echoing clangs-- and then more silence. The third track rides in on waves of Max/MSP-borne glory that enter distantly but soon make themselves much more obvious, lingering just long enough to produce an ominous vibe before fading back into nothingness, not unlike the behavior of a shoreline or Gilbert Gottfried.

It would seem Showroom Dummies has as much to do with what isn't there as with what is. It's much subtler and more polite than any of Pita's previous releases, which is no doubt due to the nature of the recording: Showroom Dummies was commissioned by Grenoble avant-garde dance group DACM as a score to accompany their performance of the same name.

I cannot claim familiarity with DACM's work, and what little information I've been able to dig up has been in the form of impossibly jumbled webpages "translated" by Google from French which say ridiculous things like, "Forts of their will to create a place of meeting and exchange between artistic universes a priori isolated the ones from the others." What I can tell you with reasonably certainty is that the performance involved a roomful of mannequins and six dancers posing all kinds of meaningful questions about the nature of perception and reality. But DACM's part in all of this seems largely irrelevant, since most of us will likely never see it.

That said, the audio portion still makes for compelling listening on its own. Personally, I'd recommend turning up your speakers really loud and hanging out in a room across the hall. Something about the distance always made this music more real to me. This is indeed ambient music-- not meant to be listened to so much as experienced-- but not in the conventional drone sense. In fact, it thrives on playing with your awareness of it. Rather than allowing you to space it out entirely, it allows you to drift off temporarily before jolting you to attention, typically kicking into high gear at exactly the moment your mind starts to wander.

Most of these tracks are built around the repetition of phrases which are tweaked gently with each recurrence. The slow pacing could be seen as a problem, but Rehberg fills the silence with such a variety of interesting sounds, from an abstracted sine wave to a deceivingly simple beat floating around in a glitched ether to backwards chunks of climatic film scores punctuated with bits of prepared piano.

Granted, there are a few moments that veer from the standard, like track five, where an echoing kickdrum buoyed by atmospheric effects is overwhelmed as the background stutters, glitches out and eventually consumes everything, leaving nothing but a high-pitched static tone in its wake. Or the closing track which, in a garbled parody of some sort of typical theatrical climax, almost begins to take on the form of melody. But more often than not, it's minimal tones that overlap and intertwine, all on so small a scale that you'd miss it were you not paying close attention.

Showroom Dummies may be substantially outside the norm of Pita's typically aggressive noise projects, but this almost makes it more valuable. With this record, Rehberg shows he's just as effective working on entirely different planes where the goal is sensory manipulation rather than simple sensory overload.

-David M. Pecoraro, October 25th, 2002