Oval (musical project)

Oval is an electronic music group founded in Germany in 1991 by Markus Popp, Sebastian Oschatz and Frank Metzger. The group is regarded as pioneering glitch music, writing on CDs to damage them and produce music with the resulting fragments.

Work history

The band's original members were Markus Popp, Sebastian Oschatz and Frank Metzger, although Oschatz and Metzger left the group in 1995. Disdaining the use of synthesizers, Oval instead deliberately mutilated CDs by writing on them with felt pens, then processed the palette of fragmented sounds to create a very rhythmic electronic style.

Markus Popp continues to release albums under the name Oval. Frank Metzger has released some singles with Mego and the Internet label Falsch, and has started a collaboration with Rossano Polidoro and Emiliano Romanelli from "TU M'" in 2003 that is called Steno, while Sebastian Oschatz is an interaction designer with Meso, a German media design collective.

In 2001 Björk sampled the track "Aero Deck" (from the 1994 album Systemisch) on her Vespertine album. Markus Popp was an integral part of the creation of Gastr Del Sol's 1998 album Camoufleur.

In 2003, Popp released a record on Thrill Jockey together with the Japanese singer Eriko Toyada. As a duo they were called So, and its record was self-titled.

After an extended silence, Oval released the EP entitled "Oh" on Thrill Jockey in June 2010. The pre-sale for this album was limited to 1,000 pressings and sold out before it was available to the public.^[1] His first album in almost a decade entitled "O" was released on Thrill Jockey September 7, 2010.

Markus Popp also composed the soundtrack for a short film Retina.

On March 8, 2013, Popp released a sixteen-track album titled Calidostópia! for free on his website. The project was funded by the Goethe Institute and the Cultural Foundation of the State of Bahia.^[2] Later that same year he released VOA (2013), an album that also emerged out of the collaboration with singers and musicians from South America.

In 2016, Popp initiated his own label, UOVOOO. Its first release was French artist Mei's twelve-track album Partura (May, 2016). The label's second release was Oval's eleven-track album Popp (October 14, 2016).

Awards

• 2015 QWARTZ Award “Lifetime Achievement Award”^[3]
• 2013 QWARTZ Award “Best Experimental Music”^[4]
• 2011 Prix Ars Electronica Honorable Mention^[5]
• 2001 Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction^[6]

Discography

Albums

• Wohnton (Ata Tak/1993)
• Systemisch (Mille Plateaux/1994)
• 94 Diskont (Mille Plateaux/1995)
• Dok (Thrill Jockey/1998)
• Szenariodisk (Thrill Jockey/1999)
• Ovalprocess (Form and Function/2000)
• Pre/Commers (Thrill Jockey/2001)
• Ovalcommers (Form and Function/2001)
• Oh (Thrill Jockey/2010)
• O (Thrill Jockey/2010)
• OvalDNA (Shitkatapult/2011)
• Calidostópia! (Goethe Institute/2013)
• Voa (2013)
• Popp (UOVOOO/2016)

See also

• Electronic music
• Acoustic ecology
• Noise Music
• List of noise musicians
• Chip music
• Circuit bending
• Dark ambient
• Sonic artifact
• No-Fi

References