OVAL
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“Oval’s Markus Popp is one of the few electronic artists to provide a strong challenge to Aphex Twin and Autechre’s well-guarded thrones” – TREBLEZINE
“With Popp, the only thing that’s for sure is that nothing’s for sure, which is why he has remained relevant for so long, and why we suspect he’ll remain relevant for decades to come.” – A CLOSER LISTEN
“It’s a great example of Popp’s talent for making ambitious experiments sound both playful and coy.” – PITCHFORK
“Oval’s thirst for merging new sounds never ends” – FREQ
Oval began in the early 90’s and rapidly gained acclaim for its innovations in electronic music. Composer Markus Popp championed software intuition over his own role in music making for many years, anticipating the AI trend in composition by nearly 30 years. Early albums found a critique of the entire system of recorded music built into every gesture. Popp toured with a desktop computer and projected his screen, constructing remarkably evocative and emotional performances from file manipulation. Each new Oval release saw Popp radically redefine his practice, introducing new elements and embracing new creative challenges, integrating cutting-edge technology and processes into his practice to ensure that each record sounded as contemporary and exhilarating as the last. Popp approached pieces more as an art director or composer than a producer. Meticulous attention to detail and a wide-eyed sense of discovery has enabled Popp to continually innovate with each release.
Latest album Scis and its companion EP Eksploio (both released by Thrill Jockey) see the producer focus on composition, working with a fresh palette of sounds to create his most emotive work to date. Popp injects a newfound playfulness into his complex loop architectures, with both album and EP exploring and subverting elements of club music. The intricate, organic drum sounds Popp introduced on the Oh! EP and O album have here been replaced with driving electronic rhythms, albeit still approached by Popp as an instrumentalist rather than a beat-maker. Where early compositions saw Popp meticulously tinkering with software and systems to reduce his own visible hand in the music, Scis instead sees Popp focus the human element in his creation, augmenting delicate and intensely crafted loops with an array of acoustic instruments. Sounds sourced from prepared pianos, woodwinds and strings were manipulated and sculpted with simulated sounds into intricate and substantial sonic layers. Popp would then record a live playthrough of the pre-constructed loops while adding in instruments from his vast collection of sound samples to shape each song. The resulting pieces have a distinctive freeform, improvised feel to them, never hiding behind “electronic abstraction” but rather engaging in a musical dialog with the listener.
In December 2021 Oval released Ovidono, an auditory art project by feat. Vlatka Alec, a fascinating scenario for a new kind of musical storytelling. Sensual, dazzling and multi-layered, the project – initially code-named “ASMR 2.0” – combines a new interpretation of the epic, timeless poetry of Ovid and Ono No Komachi (performed in Japanese by Eriko Toyoda aka SO) with Oval’s electroacoustic compositions, post-digital soundscapes, and ambitious vocal processing. The complex, whispered vocalizations evoke the tactile, immersive quality and intimacy of ASMR.
Merging the latest version of the complex, hypnotic Oval sound – no stone was left unturned in Markus’s research for this project – with the scintillating, electronically intertwined vocal performances by Vlatka and Eriko creates a sophisticated, intimate dialogue, an experience of a third music waiting to be discovered, a felt entity that effortlessly crosses boundaries of time, language, and technique.
Ovidono wants to create a place of musical longing, inviting you into a surreal garden of sound, whose hybrid poetry and design language instantly generate their own emotional pull – a lucid, intoxicating deep dive into an emotional limbo, playfully drawing new meanings out of poetry beloved for over a thousand years.
His new album Romantiq (Thrill Jockey 2023) turns the producer’s inquisitive ear to an omnipresent and yet oft ill-defined, even maligned area of music and art – the romantic. The album foregrounds the emotional drive that has always been present in Oval records, providing a genuine and unabashed interrogation of its subject matter delivered with delectable sophistication. Romantiq evolved from an audio-visual collaboration with digital artist Robert Seidel for the grand opening of the German Romantic Museum in Frankfurt – a huge outdoor projection covering the museum building. From the project’s inception both Seidel and Popp sought a more expansive definition of “romantic”, extending outward from the museum’s comprehensive survey of the 19th-century epoch in art. Romantiq surveys a staggering amount of source material, looking as much to literature, architecture and artistic traditions as it does music. Processed period instruments trace luxuriant spaces that shift from low-lit chambers to glistening palatial grandeur, glitching through past, present and future. Swelling atmospheres emerge like perfume, rich scents flooding the senses before evaporating on the breeze. Disparate traditional elements and romantic tropes are juxtaposed and recast into a future-seeking survey of ephemeral emotion. Throughout Romantiq, Popp masterfully blurs the line between the organic and digital, obscuring or revealing instruments in service of atmosphere. Each arrangement is deceptively detailed without clouding the work’s narrative arc, shifting from quiet contemplation to euphoric bliss. Through exploring the shifting notion of “romance” across time and space, Popp sculpts spaces that feel both familiar and uncanny, nostalgic and futuristic. Much like the transient emotions it surveys, Romantiq’s evocative sonics conjure flickering images that glitch, evolve and collapse in on one another – opulent neochamber music lit by the paradoxically heartwarming screen glow of social media flirtations. Romantiq’s omnivorous approach to its core theme and source material provides a wry and expansive definition of romance, capturing in surprising detail the essence of this intangible, yet universal human emotion.