Rene Hell is the best-known alias of Jeff Witscher, an electronic musician from Long Beach, California, who made his name with two synthesizer albums on Type, Porcelain Opera (2010) and The Terminal Symphony (2011). In 2011 he told Dummy that classical, minimalist and contemporary music had a great impact on him, adding: “I only wished I possessed the skill to master a traditional instrument.” The next year the Vermont label NNA Tapes paired him with Oneohtrix Point Never on a split LP, with Daniel Lopatin’s Music for Reliquary House on one side and Witscher’s In 1980 I Was a Blue Square on the other. “Meta Concrete” opens his side, and Pitchfork posted it on 28 August 2012, three weeks before the record came out.
The label billed his half as a suite of five pieces for piano, synthesizer and computer, setting mid-20th-century classical music against chaotic electronic blasts. “Meta Concrete”, at 4:12, is the first statement of that idea. In Fact’s description it starts as a piano ballad in 12/8, with a chime picking out an odd melody, before digital noise breaks it apart. Pitchfork and XLR8R also heard glitch overrunning the piano. By Fact’s account the side ends where it began: the last piece goes back to the opener’s 12/8 piano and chimes at a slower pace, with strings where the electronics had been.
The other four pieces reached critics under different names. Fact and XLR8R reviewed “Quelque Terreur”, “Prelude to the Bridge”, “Variation in C” and “Bl, Qs”. On the LP, released that September, they became “Untitled Solo 4”, “The Bridge”, “Qi” and “Quick Folding Motion”. Critics split over whether the contrast worked. Fact called the side “a superbly considered collection of miniatures”, and Beats Per Minute scored it above Lopatin’s half. XLR8R and The Skinny both used the word “polite” for it.
Witscher kept the piano. PAN’s notes for his next Rene Hell album, Vanilla Call Option (2013), set meditative piano, strings and voice against piercing synthesis, and say it was built on the move between airports, performance spaces and public libraries. In 2020 he and Jack Callahan started the new-music label FLEA, and in 2024 the pair released a guitar-pop album, Think Differently, as Callahan & Witscher. “Meta Concrete” is where a noise musician who wished he had mastered a traditional instrument wrote for the piano, then let the computer in.
