[hymn 20]

Originally released as a CDr on Hymns in an edition of 134 copies.

Review from Indy Weekly:

"Raleigh," the longest track on Chapel Hill sound artist Jeff Rehnlund's Our Thin Mercy of Error, finds a stranger in our familiar lands: First, we hear Rehnlund at a Capital City diner, ordering coffee while a woman talks on a cell phone about health problems and tough years. A small girl explains a television commercial before a man tells Rehnlund what happens around Moore Square Park. An organizer for a youth program joins the field recording midstream, offering Rehnlund three Kurt Vonnegut books for a $5 donation. But Rehnlund's just given all of his money to his panhandling tour guide, and he doesn't know what to say when the guy asks him where to find potential benefactors: "I'm not from around here." Exactly.

It's that ethos that sums up what's best about Rehnlund's promising, 134-piece pressing of his debut for the Gainesville CD-R label Hymns. He approaches the discovery of sounds with experimental exuberance, sliding his tape player across a table on "Raleigh" like a director cutting between scenes and finding an unintended meaning, or creating a flitting collage of boiling pots, radio receivers, cartoon music and film strips on fantastic opener "160 India St." The combination of his sounds—alternately rhythmic, distended and droning, or highly randomized—glows with naiveté, or at least the sense that Rehnlund hasn't chosen them for didactic or theoretical reasons: He's chosen these sounds, simply and pragmatically, because they sound good.

That's not to say that Error is without its own ideas or sense of logic. On the contrary, early album highlight "mera" and closing track "Bowls" work as technical and timbral inverses, the sounds of the former shifted up until they pierce through the warm analogue clicks that Rehnlund uses as one of his primary instruments. The other rolls its high, warm tones into the hiss, gently feeding back in soothing circles of sound. This isn't new ground, but it's a legacy Rehnlund works well, nevertheless. —Grayson Currin