MIMEO (short for the Music in Movement Electronic Orchestra) was at first a promoter's project. In 1997, Hans Falb, Peter van Bergen, and Gerlinde Koschik put together a travelling festival, the Music in Movement festival. They asked various European improvisers working with electronics to participate to the event. The MIMEO, an electronic-free improvisation-based entity, would follow the festival from venue to venue. Music in Movement went to Nickelsdorf, the Hague, and Wuppertal, and then the promoters had to call it quits. A CD of music compiled from these three performances, Queue, was first released on the German label Grob in 1998 (as a limited CD-R item) and later picked up by Perdition Plastics.

Once the first concert was over, the promoters' project had become a musicians' project. Eight of them -- Keith Rowe, Phil Durrant, Thomas Lehn, Gert-Jan Prins, Cor Fuhler, Christian Fennesz, Peter Rehberg, and Jérôme Noetinger -- decided to keep the unit alive and recruited four new members: Kaffe Matthews, Marcus Schmickler, Rafael Toral, and Markus Wettstein. This lineup performed three concerts at the Jack Pohl Presents... event in Cologne, December 1998. A two-CD set recorded between shows, Electric Chair + Table, was released in 2000 on Grob. ~ François Couture, Rovi