- It may be hard fully to comprehend in this post-glitch age, but Oval's Markus Popp is one of recent electronic music's most elusive and significant revolutionaries. Rising to prominence in the mid-'90s, when the second and third Oval albums, Systemisch and Diskont 94, sketched a new paradigm for electronica, Popp is as much known for the forbidding discourse of his projects, which approached generative art by seizing software's mistakes as hidden intentions, as he is for the labyrinthine beauty of his music. Diskont 94's "Do While" may be the perfect example—an ever-changing aerial view of brilliant-cut digital detritus—but Popp reached real critical mass later, with the Process, Pre/Commers and Commers trilogy, where he all but disappeared into the machinery. Mission accomplished, or so it seemed.
It's been nine years since Commers, and seven years since the lone So album, Popp's collaboration with Japanese singer Eriko Toyoda. In 2010 he has made up for this silence by releasing not only O, available as a 70-track double-CD or 76-track double-LP-and-download, but the 15-track Oh 12-inch, and two free Ringtones download EPs. That's over 100 tracks of new Oval, which is a lot to wade through, even though a good portion of it barely scrapes past the one-minute mark. If Oval phase one was a critical response to the directive nature of software and digital technology, phase two feels, in part, like either a capitulation to or commentary on the MP3 era's encouragement of glut economics. Either way, at a certain point exhaustion sets in; there is simply too much Oval on offer.
Wading through O, my first impression is one of clarity—gone are the waves, floods and overflows of digital noise that characterised Diskont 94 or Commers. Instead, Popp has turned to a "readily made instrument"—a PC—composing tiny melody fragments or fragile chordal movements, and seemingly subjecting them to relatively understated processing. So while the language of glitch, which Popp helped create, is still in some small way present, his musical logic now feels exposed.
Popp was always a master of texture, and much of O sounds lovely, in an oddly plastic, pro-forma way. Springy, glassy threads of tone jolt and bustle between your ears, while stretched, strained and jumpy notes trickle along in the background. If it's generative, it's closer to the character of the wind chime—endless variations on several distinctive sounds—than the maze of complexity that characterised some of the records released by early Oval and its peers.
Sometimes, O falls flat: on the first disc of the double-CD set, half of the tracks are punctuated by programmed drums, which detract from the streamlined focus of the music, leading Oval into drearily post-rock territory. The second disc, made up of fifty miniatures, is slightly more compelling. Journal entries to the first disc's essays, they're oddly charming, feeding into the ringtone logic that's informing Popp's current practice.
O is a welcome return for Popp, one of electronic music's most quixotic characters. True to form, it's also an experiment, and experiment begets both failure and success. O's seeming "failure" lies more in its overwhelming scope than its content, though the latter can't help but suffer diminution resulting from the former. I quite like Popp's new pop, although I've had rather too much of it lately. If anything, the cover of the preceding Oh 12-inch, a photograph of Celeste Boursier-Mourgenot's From Here to Ear installation, where zebra finches perch uncertainly on an electric guitar, feels like the best comment on Popp's form—the gentle, insistent pecking away at the old order, using its own tools to bring his personal vision into the new age. Or maybe it's just the natural world confronting the musical instrument on a human/animal scale.
TracklistCD 1
01. Panorama
02. Ah!
03. Shhh
04. Glossy
05. Stop Motion
06. Sky
07. Beige
08. Brahms Mania
09. Cinematic
10. Cry
11. Cottage
12. I Heart Musik
13. Salamanca
14. Dolo
15. Dricas
16. Cyprus
17. Vessel
18. Dynamo
19. Finis
20. Emocor
CD 2
01. Citybike
02. Oslo
03. Ij
04. Rivo
05. Pomp
06. Blinky
07. Parallax
08. Koral
09. Kolor
10. Auto matic
11. Dream Over
12. Pastell
13. Magnify
14. Drift
15. Allover
16. Derby
17. Flax
18. Bergen Best
19. Matinee
20. Kukicha
21. 6 AM
22. Flamingo
23. Rivo II
24. Goodbye
25. Fontan
26. Co-Echo
27. Stop motion II
28. Vitesse
29. September
30. Voila
31. Vegas top
32. Expo
33. Lonely
34. Java
35. Klack
36. Project Evergreen
37. Rainyday
38. Big City Nights
39. Rosammie
40. Gallo
41. May Tea
42. Chronograph
43. Jank
44. Breezy
45. Press
46. Form faktor
47. Terminal
48. Karo
49. Swiss Summer
50. Happyend