Markus Popp is a laptop legend. In the 1990s he made his name (along with two other members of the original Oval) by pioneering the clicks and cuts of electronica that came to be known as glitch. The trio's most notorious practice was to deface cds using knives, marker pens or sticky tape and create loops out of the malfunctions that resulted.
As a kind of modern day variant of John Cage's prepared piano, these 'prepared compact discs'
produced noise that in normal circumstances would have been rejected as defective or just plain ugly. The randomness of these sounds was the point of the exercise.
The nature of this experimentation meant that the human element , while not entirely redundant, was certainly of secondary importance. It was, after all, the 'machine' that came up with the finished goods. The human could create a platform to manage these sound sources but the process reduced any meaningful emotional link with the music.
Subsequently , after the three man Oval became just Popp, the albums Ovalprocess and Ovalcommers were not, strictly speaking, 'glitch' at all but still machine driven in that they were made using a Mac Powerbook .
Now, after a ten year hiatus, Popp is back declaring he has overcome his disdain for conventional instruments and wants to make 'real' music. He has named the album 'O' to signify a new beginning. The album has been preceded by an EP (Oh) and is accompanied by some free downloadable ringtones (Ah).
Even a cursory listen to the album will tell the listener that Popp's statement needs to be qualified. It doesn't, for example, mean that he has sold his computer, taken up the guitar and started writing love songs. By 'real' , he means that he is more in control of the technology. For this release Popp wants to be the primary creative element and uses a standard PC with stock sounds and plug-ins rather than a specifically designed platform.
The resulting product may be significantly less 'difficult' but the concept is every bit as uncompromising. The two CD set comprises 70 instrumental tracks in under two hours. Disc 1 contains 20 tracks , including ten longer pieces, that's to say tracks lasting around four minutes. Disc 2 has a massive 50 tracks, half a dozen last around 2 minutes but the remainder are little more than one minute long and many significantly less.
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Quite how Popp envisages the typical listening experience of such a collection is anybody's guess. Possibly, with the revolution of the I-pod shuffle, he envisages the tracks appearing like aural blipverts. I can't imagine many will play this through from start to finish more than a couple of times.
The tracks mostly have one word titles ; to pick a few at random, we have Gloss, Pomp, Cry, Cinematic and Dynamo. None of these give many clues about the content. The only three word title is somewhat incongruously named I Heart Musik.
With even the experimental work of the early Oval releases like 94 Diskont now sounding relatively conventional, Popp would have to be very optimistic if he imagined this album breaking any new ground. With the occasional appearance of drum and cymbal sounds there is a hint of actual instruments but this is still laptop electronica albeit in a far less abrasive form than the earliest Oval releases.
Perhaps most strikingly the very short pieces do not seem as unfinished off cuts but just small identifiable parts of a bigger jig-saw. The album is by no means easy listening but, yes it does sound warmer and more human, like mini-snack versions of Fennesz.
It's an album every fan of this genre will need to have in some format but I suspect that many will conclude that when it comes to Oval shaped music, the more things change, the more they sound the same.
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