It's hard to talk about Oval's recordings without using phrases like "raises questions." In the 1990s, Markus Popp used the Oval name to make contemporary art that took sound as its form and the relationship between music and technology as its subject, which is to say music scrubbed (partially) clean of the bourgeois idea of the "musician." It was interesting to hear, sometimes even pleasant or dreamy or emotionally affecting, but that always seemed like a side effect rather than a goal. The records he made in that era supposedly made use of generative sound; the idea was that he set up the software and let it rip, and at some point the pieces that ended up on the albums came out of the machine like so many punch-cards.
Popp's role, of course, also included selecting, editing, and sequencing the material the software generated, which of course raised various questions. And the recordings themselves prominently featured the sounds of technology hitting its limits: digital distortion, glitchy microsecond-long tones and, more than anything else, skipping-CD noise. (For years, the standard joke when any CD skipped was "I didn't know Oval had done a remix of this!")
Popp took the better part of the past decade off from recording, and now he's returned with a deluge of new material. Oval's various 2010 releases-- the Oh EP, the two "Ringtone" EPs that have turned up as free downloads, and now O-- are built around digitally manipulated sounds that sound very much like they were originally made with human hands and metal strings. Possibly even bits of a guitar, if such an archaic device existed here in the future. The even-numbered tracks on the new album's first disc go one step further: they've got drumming on them, created by Popp using computer software.
However he's making it, Oval's new music is functionally much closer to his older music than to anything else, if a bit more skeletal-- nicely harmonized blips and smears of abstracted noise (with some relationship to plucked-string timbres a lot of the time), rhythms that sometimes splatter freely and sometimes snap to a regular pulse. It's lovely, it's pleasantly unsettling, and there's a hell of a lot of it. The "songs"-with-drumming on the first disc alternate with briefer sketches, and the second disc is 50 "ringtones" that are just a minute or so long and explore a single texture or cluster of notes. So "abundance" is a concept in play too, along with "acoustic sound," "modern listening span," and "hope you like our new direction!"
Popp has noted that "riff" is another one of the ideas he's engaging these days, although he apparently has an unusual definition of "riff"; most of the tone patterns here could easily pass for an automatic sewing machine with a corrupted programming chip let loose on a hammer dulcimer. (About the only riff here that inspires "oh, this one!" reactions on a third or fourth listen belongs to the singsongy second-disc ringtone "Jank"). But the O/Oh/Ringtone cluster of releases genuinely is a stretch from an artist who'd previously seemed like he'd worked himself into a corner. It takes a very different route from his earlier work. If it ends up in a very similar place, that just suggests his musical sensibilities have been asserting themselves all along.
