(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
Oval, the project of Berlin composer Markus Popp, initially aided by Frank Metzger and Sebastian Oschatz, picked up where the experiments of Neu and Faust had left off, particularly their studio manipulations of acoustic material. Popp had at his disposal far more advanced technology and the revival of ambient music.
After a first, still clumsy album, Wohnton (Ata Tak, 1993), with many sung pieces, Popp found his true vocation in the abstract music of Systemisch (Mille Plateaux, 1994 - Thrill Jockey, 1996), an attempt to apply the musique concrte of the 1950s to the ambient music of the 1990s. The album in fact contains eleven tracks built by playing the defects of a compact disc. The instrument is really just a pretext: the heart of the operation is the way in which Popp lets his little sonic monsters flow harmoniously. Beyond appreciating the timbral qualities of Textuelle and Tonregie, there is very little to listen to.
94 Diskont (Thrill Jockey, 1996) is a summa of his worst (best?) excesses. The highlight of the album is the long suite Do While (24 minutes), a series of feverishly paced loops that re-propose the same dull metallic rumble in slightly different guises. The other tracks are jumbles of friendly noises (Cross Selling) or leftovers from the deconstructed pop of the early days.
Popp was left without his partners for Dok (Thrill Jockey, 1997), but he was aided by Christopher Charles, who supplied the raw material for him to play with. The main difference compared with the previous album is that Popp has abandoned repetition and thus the study of rhythm. These nine futuristic watercolors therefore return to the musique concrte of Systemisch. The music of Lens-Flared Capital and the other eight pieces is still static and subdued, but it floats freely instead of being trapped in geometric structures. The first album was constructed with sounds produced by defective compact discs; the second is constructed with sounds of bells and crowds. These are records of mind-numbing banality.
(Original English text by Piero Scaruffi)
Popp is also in Microstoria with Jan Werner of Mouse On Mars. This project deals with an ambient version of Oval's glitch/digital music. Init Ding (Thrill Jockey, 1995) contains ten brief pieces of electronic music: surreal vignettes (16:9), tone studies (Fund), musique concrete (Communerism). Sonic events are crushed to a fluid cacophony (Slap Top) or organized in geometric patterns (File Care) or diluted in amoebic reverbs (Pokus). This album aimed at being for modern electronica what Brian Eno's Before And After Science was to early electronica. It failed, but nonetheless upped the ante for sound manipulation.
The news on snd (Mille Plateaux, 1996) is that it features some melodies (Endless Summer). The compositional method is obscure, but the result is that Sleepy People is a slowly moving bubble of processed noise, Per Formal seems to obey a mathematical formula for sequencing loops, Feld 1 appears to be a chaotic assemblage of found sounds at very low volume. Bpi is related to the classical avantgarde of the 1960s, and, in fact, if you play them at double speed, these tracks are not all that different from Morton Subotnick's pioneering electronic jams, particularly the dissonant Teil Zeit and Quit Not Save.
Reprovisers (Mille Plateaux, 1997) is an album of remixes.
Oval's EPs Aero Deko and Szenario (Thrill Jockey, 1999) erase whatever emotion was still present on the early albums and regress towards the most minimal form of music.
Microstoria's Improvisers (Sonig, 2000) is a set of four live tracks (two of them unreleased).
Microstoria's Model 3 Step 2 (Thrill Jockey, 2000) is a less smooth exercise in the same kind of free improvisation, highly reminiscent of free jazz (and even, occasionally, of Jimi Hendrix) except that it employs digital instruments (Me-Too-Modula). Most of the music is subliminal and chaotic (Glocky Bit, Soso Sound), rarely attempting to develop a narrative, although occasionally extreme dissonance risults in extreme tension (Kontra). Microstoria's avantgarde pastiches demand great effort on the part of the listener, but occasionally reward her with some of the most intriguing sound sequencing in memory.
Oval's Ovalprocess (Thrill Jockey, 2000) abandoned the
"clicks-and-cuts" ambient style and turned to grating cacophony.
Popp exploited an idea originally advanced by Dr Nerve's Nick Didkovsky: provide the means for anybody to compose Oval music.
The album does not contain the actual process but only samples of what can be
achieved,
and what we actually hear (eleven untitled tracks) is computer-generated sounds.
1 is a wall of noise.
4 sounds like a factory of frenzied machines.
2 has beats (plural) but changes so much that it's hard to pin down what it is.
Pieces like 3, 6 and 7 are so simplistic that one suspects
they are jokes on the listener.
Overall, this sounds like Popp's attempt at making the equivalent of
Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music.
But what a distance separates the two.
Popp is still searching for a reason to continue to make music, after he exhausted the possibilities of his digital sampling style.
If nothing else, the sounds have more color and less harshness. But Popp still hasn't found a way to turn his abstract paintings into theater, into stories, into emotion.
In the meantime, Popp is touring United States museums with a sound installation called "Skotodesk".
By increasing the level of chaos and sharpening the pitch of the "glitches",
oval turns Ovalcommers (Form & Function, 2001) into his
version of Merzbow's noisecore.
Electronic noises do more than just "float" over the ambient sounds extracted from keyboards and guitars: they "pierce" that surface, those oceanic waves, those infinite shrouds. The effect is not unlike that of mantras hummed in the middle of an inferno. At the same time, it is true that too little happens on these albums to justify their existence.
Twi feels like a heap of random noises
Doku is another concentrate of feral noise but this time there seems to be a logic.
Com hides a melody somewhere under a thick dirty cover of glitches.
Superscalar dissolves a neoclassical string quartet in muriatic acid.
But, again, too much feels facile and superficial.
Invisible Architecture #1 (Audiosphere, 2003) is Microstoria's least stimulating album, a mere collage of old ideas.
Markus Popp's side-project So (Thrill Jockey, 2003) reinvented glitch music by juxtaposing its minimally noisy soundscapes with ethereal, breathless vocalist Eriko Toyada. Not exactly a return to the song format, but clearly a sign that Popp was becoming more interested in structure rather than mere texture.
The EP Oh (Thrill Jockey, 2010), Markus Popp's first release in a decade, redefining Oval as a more conventional rock band rather than a glitch
project, was the prelude to the double-disc O (Thrill Jockey, 2010), a collection of 70 sophisticated post-ambient guitar vignettes.
Popp continued to release albums as Oval:
OvalDNA (Shitkatapult, 2011),
Calidostopia! (2013),
Voa (2013),
September (2014),
Popp (2016),
Scis (2020),
Ovidono (2021),
Romantiq (2023).
