from Smooth Assailing:

formerly residing in lansdale, pennsylvania, apparently jeff's now in korea, seoul to be precise. sweet, he should collaborate with joe foster. i'd check that album out. other than that, there's precious little info about the guy. he doesn't really seem to keen on the whole idea of self-promotion, but that's not a bad thing. sometimes it's nice not to be beaten over the head with one's musical endeavors.

jeff rehnlund is embracing both noise and avant-garde idioms with our thin mercy of error. across the span of the disc's fifty-one minutes he'll work his way through cut-up noise collage work (160 india street), more easily identifiable dense noise (schmid), field recordings (raleigh), rounded out musical pieces (green piano), atmospheric drone (bowls) and finds the time to touch on everything in between.

while as a whole the album's a success, there are several tracks on here that stand out for me. the shrill chimes on mera can be counted as one. even if it feels like someone's drilling into my head there's still this subliminal beauty to it which transcends that piercing noise. i'd advise that you keep the volume down during it, if you value the future of your hearing. the squeals and feedback of valado is a winning combination and i love the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach of the whimsical birthday. i'm not sure if it's a toy or a music box that's providing the background layer, but it's a great addition. near the end of the track it sounds like it's being strummed, so hell if i can figure out what he's using. the only track that i could really do without is the ten minute long raleigh. the first three minutes of it i quite enjoy, but the last seven minutes are bits from a couple of different (vocal) field recordings that are just kind of boring. rarely do i actually want to listen to people talking (especially when i'm not involved in the conversation). that's why i listen to music all of the time instead of hanging out with people, so maybe it's just me, but it really kills the pace of the disc. thankfully, it's followed up by three of the album's more sonically interesting pieces, so that minor hiccup gets pushed out your mind pretty quick like.
:: posted by avant gardening

FROM INDEPENDENT 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

from Vital Weekly 573

JEFF REHNLUND - OUR THIN MERCY OF ERROR (CDR by Hymns)
Not much information is given on the artist Jeff Rehnlund, who just released 'Our Thin Mercy Of error' on the Hymns label, who brought us some fine noise before. Rehnlund is only slightly connected ton the world of noise. His music is loud at times, that we can be sure of, but that's only one side of the coin. He mixes up a whole bunch of field recordings and collated them together with 'tapes acquired in and between New York and North Carolina, anonymous North Atlantic locations, and places invariably left off the maps: deathbeds, sinking ships, angles of wind, childhood hallucinations, rooftops, media signals, and your bedroom', which probably is depicting already what this sounds like. Rehnlund doesn't apply computers or high quality tape decks, but the lowest means possible. Splicing hissy tapes together, taping sounds on microcassettes and re-assembling into quite a vivid sound assemblage/collage. It worked best for me when it stays away from the noise outbursts such as in 'Schmid', but when it's more introspective and personal collage. Almost like a diary been cut up and put together in way that leaves a lot open for suggestion. Quite nice this one, moving away from the certainties of noise and into something else. (FdW)