Oval

• Genre: Leftfield/IDM

About

He was not the first to explore the spaces between digital sounds, the moments of error in desktop audio or worship at the shrine of the glitch, but Markus Popp and his collaborators have become the most well known orchestrators of the skipping compact disc and broken loop sample. Beyond the tape experiments of Muzique Concrete pioneers like Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer, Oval brings phenomenological sound experiments to the digital realm. They have a very cohesive and immediately recognizable sound; one that creates a polarity between lush, tonal samples and minimal, raw digital distortion. Loops of sound never seem to line-up, always just slightly off center, like camera shutters clicking for out-of-focus snapshots of sound. While Oval is immersed in envelop-pushing audio technology (which they have recently made available to the public on cd-rom) and French philosophy (interviews with Markus Popp usually require at least a functioning understanding of the writings of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze), their tracks exist in a hazy, impalpable dreamspace - vague, ephemeral shadows of sound cast by the fleeting light of a strobe.

- Marc Kate