Name: Oval - O
Item: Oval - O
Author: jon dale

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.

Tracklist

CD 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