Some day, when the machines take over the Earth (and mark my words, they will), they're going to keep Oval's Markus Popp around as their official composer. Long an artisan who paints tapestries of sound with damaged digital brushes, Popp's compositions would probably seem terribly decadent to a sentient machine; they are, after all, broken equations. Popp's ability to resequence these disturbed recollections is either fascinating or, if you're of a more pop-song-centric mindset, patently unlistenable.
Whenever I listen to Oval, I can't help but be fascinated by Popp's process. What kind of mental attenuation is required to identify a single CD skip or digital access error as optimal for music making? And what sort of mind can not only design the software and objects that create these elements, but can translate them on the fly into a set of viable rock and roll reference points? Because that's what Popp's doing here, more than on any of his previous records -- he's creating a loose, libidinous sprawl that's the digital analog (if you'll forgive the term) to rock music.
In the interest of understanding Ovalprocess properly, I listened to it in a room full of machines. Played at gradually-increasing volume through my laptop's CD-ROM drive, it serenaded a room full of servers and network equipment, all of which hummed back at it in an unobtrusive, indifferent exchange of aural data byproducts. At lower volumes I heard almost nothing, as Oval's disc-skips and seemingly-randomized bass pulses seem to sit on the outskirts of hearing. But as I increased the volume with each successive play, melodies revealed themselves (and I eventually stopped jumping each time the first track employed a tone identical to the main file server's "Something Very Bad Is Happening" warning beep). Eventually, the womblike harmonies become so overt, so obvious and soothing that you wonder how you ever could have missed them. The digital sizzle, the dropouts and the blips align themselves in pleasurable arrays, mixed with dissected modem handshakes and other squelchy artefacts of machine connectivity. Perhaps, to the file servers, it sounded like a Tom Jones album.
But is it any good? With any work as loosely musical as Ovalprocess, that's a hard question to answer. As always, some listeners will run screaming from it. Other, more receptive audience members -- those who aren't too lazy to write off Ovalprocess is "more of the same" without ever truly understanding what "the same" is -- may simply need to identify the elusive order within Popp's work. Repeated listens will bring this out -- it's all just a matter of subverting the initial paradigm.
The title Ovalprocess also refers to the software application that Popp uses to create his music. Built into an installation called the Skotodesk, the Ovalprocess allows listeners to take an interactive hand in Popp's creative methods, building their own Oval-like music. Think of it as the Oval Home Game. I gather that the Skotodesk installation is touring this summer, which will give us all a chance to understand Popp's mindset -- for after a few minutes behind the Skotodesk, users will unconsciously begin to develop their own patterns and preferences in the creation of digital byproduct/artefacts. Behind the Skotodesk, you can begin your own search for the Ultimate Skip.
