The two men of Microstoria, Oval’s Markus Popp and Mouse on Mars’ Jan St. Werner, don’t particularly like to refer to their music as “music.” Popp prefers the term “audio,” as might be expected from someone who has scribbled on CDs as part of his creative process, while St. Werner copped in a 2018 interview to being uncomfortable with the mantle of musician. The sounds on their first two albums, 1995’s init ding and 1996’s _snd, initially seem to gel with that stance. They resemble something you might find lying under a rock or lurking beneath the surface of a tidepool: You don’t so much try to comprehend them as admire their contours and movements, marveling at their very existence. Yet there’s a thrilling tension between the Germans’ desire to remove human impulses from their art and their obvious delight in making it.
The two were in their mid-twenties when they made these recordings, and their stars in the electronic underground were rising. init ding came a year after Oval’s pioneering Systemisch, which placed Popp’s arsenal of CD skips and interference blats within the context of chord progressions that sounded almost like pop; the masterpiece 94diskont was just a week away. Meanwhile, Mouse on Mars were moving from the ambient techno of their 1994 debut, Vulvaland, toward something far less categorizable. October 1995 brought Iaora Tahiti, which took sharp-edged electronics and drowned them in the same ’60s space-age cheese that was enthralling artists all over the world, from Jim O’Rourke in Chicago to Stereolab in London to the Shibuya-kei scene in Tokyo. Small wonder O’Rourke and David Grubbs would enlist Popp to work on Gastr Del Sol’s post-rock classic Camoufleur—nor that both O’Rourke and Stereolab would appear on the 1997 Microstoria remix comp Reprovisers, a fantastic summation of this zeitgeist.
For all of Popp’s and Werner’s efforts to stand apart from their work, a spirit of possibility courses through init ding. The duo made much of this music by toggling between synth patches while playing, something anyone who’s ever owned an electronic instrument has done at one point, though rarely with results this spectacular. The underlying drones and chords seem continually to turn over on themselves, refusing to simply hang in the air. Meanwhile, Popp and Werner layer all manner of strange sounds, not least the whoops on opener “16:9” that sound like the carnivorous kin of the chintziest tropical bird effects from the exotica bin. There are sounds with analogues in the real world, like an organ on “Fund” or a creaky old upright on “Dokumint,” but they blend into the music’s overall tenor of alien sponginess. It’s all coated in a patina of noise and static—not the tactile crackles of Burial or the Caretaker but a sort of ferric crust that makes everything sound old and weathered.
If init ding sounds reasonably “played,” that’s not at all the case with _snd, one of the most beguiling albums of the glitch era. Here, the madcap experimentation of the init ding sessions gives way to a total control of timbre. The interference that once lay on top of their tracks has become completely absorbed into the music; everything appears smudged, damaged or otherwise corroded, threaded between massive sub-bass subductions and high-end scrapes that test both listening habits and the limits of perception. Listen to _snd at low volume and the gentler elements of the music might disappear. Listen to it through blaring speakers and the full force of _snd’s dynamic range emerges. But this is not an “ambient” experience, and those looking for one may come out of this album disappointed if not infuriated. _snd works less like Oval’s dulcet 24-minute ambient classic “Do While” than the drones of the late Phill Niblock, which lose something when treated as casual listening and which the composer himself demanded be played at deafening volume.
The two records have been packaged together as a 2xLP reissue from Thrill Jockey, with a crisp new remaster from Rashad Becker. On Bandcamp and most streaming services, the two albums segue into each other with no clear division between them, and they flow into each other easily, with the last strains of “Dokumint” dissolving into the flickers and howls of _snd opener “Sleepy People / Network Down.” The two work together as a classic-rock-style double album, with init ding as the more playful A/B sides and _snd as the moodier C/D where the artists get down to business. This is the type of vestige from vinyl-era orthodoxy the two professed non-musicians would undoubtedly scoff at. But if Microstoria set out to separate themselves from the world of music, they’ve failed: These records instead affirm great music’s ability to confound and enthrall.
