By Genre: Glitch, ASMR
Favorite Tracks: “As I Do,” “Invisible Colors,” “Of Dreams”
The earliest lineup of Oval was a fully-fledged four-piece who made gentle, abstract glitch-pop songs with vocals that sounded a bit like their contemporaries in The Notwist or Attwenger at their moodiest. Over the years, Markus Popp (who’s carried the Oval name solo for all but five of the project’s 30+ years) became more interested in what a track from their late 90s album SYSTEMISCH might call “The Politics of Digital Audio,” shedding traditional song structures (and members—Frank Metzger maintains he and fellow Oval co-founder Sebastian Oschatz never truly left, but were shut out by Popp’s burgeoning interests in putting concepts before music) in favor of longer-form explorations of process. SYSTEMISCH was famously sculpted out of a damaged CD copy of Aphex Twin’s SELECTED AMBIENT WORKS: VOL II, and by the early 2000s, the press cycles of Popp’s new releases were more focused on his customized software then the music he made with it.
By 2002, Popp had ceased to see himself as a recording artist, speaking fancifully in an interview with Sound on Sound magazine of democratizing the Oval process (in the form of an application called, you guessed it, Ovalprocess) and rejecting the studio entirely in favor of viewing “music as software” rather than something created with it. By 2003, after releasing a few more albums with various projects (the most relevant to our case being SO, a collaboration with singer/songwriter Eriko Toyoda), Popp seemed to have dropped off the face of the planet.
New Oval material started appearing in 2010, and during the hiatus, a funny thing seems to have happened: Markus Popp embraced his homophonous pop destiny and started writing “songs” instead of “pieces.” In interviews, he spoke of riffs, clubs, and “bangers.” After spending so many years rejecting the mantle of musician, he adopted it with vigor, and the past decade has been even more productive and diverse than the project’s original run. Oval’s latest, OVIDONO, re-teams with So’s Eriko Toyodo and brings multidisciplinary artist Vlatka Alec into the fold to re-interpret the work of poets Ovid & Ono no Komachi. This is an Oval album, though, and on top of that, it’s an Oval album where the explicit vocal touchstone is ASMR recordings. Words are present, to be certain, but the focus is less on what’s spoken and far more on the processed sonic texture of the largely-whispered delivery. Oval’s 90’s output was famous for its “clicks & cuts” aesthetic and frequent use of the sound of a CD skip, but the equivalent tic here is saliva shifting in the mouth, resampled and fractalized into sweeping clouds of audio. If I’m being honest, it’s a sound I’ve always found unpleasant, but it’s certainly fascinating to hear it recontextualized in this fashion.
The music on OVIDONO, like Oval’s 2010 “second debut” O, is largely driven by representational sounds rather than Popp’s earlier abstractions, with the bright, buzzing guitar-like plucks of that record replaced with darker, glassy keyboard tones more reminiscent of struck bells or tines than strings. Compositionally speaking, the songs are loose and airy, and unlike Popp’s prior Toyoda collaboration, which foregrounded his glitchery, processing and distortion to create an extraordinarily dynamic and occasionally even punishing soundscape, the mood here is entirely low-key, with the glitches, while omnipresent, rarely taking the lead.
The album has slightly jazzy affectations that wouldn’t sound out of place on some slightly artsier future version of ECM Records—it’s largely one-note, but it’s a pleasant one, and it’s certainly unexplored territory for Oval, a nearly unrecognizable gear shift from last year’s SCIS, a 120-bpm exploration of the dance floor. Nobody’s going to mistake OVIDONO for a 94 DISKONT-esque door-opener of a record-Oval’s era of expanding the boundaries of electronic music is long-over. These days, Popp seems content to push his own boundaries, explore new variations on and occasionally even reinvent his own sound. Who am I to complain about being allowed on that journey with him? It’s more novel than truly great, but I’ll always take novelty over wheel-spinning-here’s to a million more weird one-offs.
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