Oval- Missing in action?

straight

straight

wings cru
ive been reappraising the work of marcus popp as oval as i tend to do during times of heartbreak (im a long term girlfriend down) and have been trying to find out if he's been up to anything of late; not a sausage as far as i can see. every year or so i see a promise of a new album but nothing seems to come from it.

the last two albums (ovalcommers and the 'so' album with eriko) sound even more relevant now than they did when they were released in 2001-2003 compared to other glitch music of the time and if noones ever checked them out i reccomend you do, especially in the light of the success of guys like tim hecker who seem so massively influenced by ovals later sound.

I know he was working with the tu'm guys but has anyone any idea where he's been?
 
Z

zhao

there are no accidents
i think you should write him and tell him that his music is very good for broken hearts. he'd be pleased, but uncomfortably so perhaps... as Marcus always maintains that his music is not "his", nor is it "music". he likes to fancy himself an interface designer who merely allows the system to do what it wants -- so any kind of "emotional" content is purely coincidental.

i of course think he is full of shit (in a good way) :)

i can not listen to ovalcommers at all. and so, much less than that. Tim Hecker's been around for as long as Oval, no?
 
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trouc

trouc
curious why you can't listen to em. those are easily my favorite works by him and really top a lot of other stuff around that time. commers for example i think's way better than endless summer, does everything e-s is supposed to do but just does it better, but somehow it was totally under the radar...
 
straight

straight

wings cru
i know tim hecker has been working for a long time and ive been following his work since radio amor (an album i dont think he's topped), i just think harmony in ultraviolet borrows rhythmically from oval quite a bit and its the album that seems to have introduced him to the pitchfork crowd.
i'm surprised zhao, what's the ovalcommers beef? i enjoy the earlier oval group work but it sounds to me like its more about the process, when it had got to commers theyd developed a vocabulary to work with and became much more concise and emotional. there is something about the arc of the first 3 tracks that has me weeping like a smacked toddler.
 
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wektor

wektor

Well-known member
woops said:
every time i saw a laptop at a gig 98-00 it has the Maddest stuff coming out of it. what you're describing settled in pretty quick after that.
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something happened with or after the PowerBook G3 release, and there was no turning back
 
wektor

wektor

Well-known member
is it that after at moment it had been more or less settled what is understood as being proficient and good with this new gear?
Both Powerbook G3 came and Max/MSP came out in 1997, Native Instruments Reaktor just slightly earlier, in 1996
 
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0bleak

Well-known member
I dunno, I still feel all that stuff has a sort of similar sound.
Is generating sounds and rhythms by messing with physical CDs really that different than applying processing to a waveform in a DAW?
 
0

0bleak

Well-known member
shakahislop said:
it sounds like electricity going through circuits rather then moving blocks around in a DAW
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Nah, it's still digitally generated sound.
Don't let formative musical experiences cloud reality.
Also, there a million ways to make sounds and rhythms in DAWs besides just moving blocks around - and programming sequences, something that people were doing well before DAWS, is essentially the same concept of moving blocks around.
It's all equally nerdy, but we're always trying to justify our prefences rather than just being happy with liking some things more than others, sometimes for subconscious reasons or being formative musical experiences.
 
woops

woops

is not like other people
the reason I'm going tonight and reviving this thread is that listening to dok was such a formative experience

i was careful to specify laptops rather than computers or whatever digital sound generator
 
wektor

wektor

Well-known member
0bleak said:
I dunno, I still feel all that stuff has a sort of similar sound.
Is generating sounds and rhythms by messing with physical CDs really that different than applying processing to a waveform in a DAW?
Click to expand...
well yeah
 
wektor

wektor

Well-known member
wektor said:
sounds are all the same all over, but a particular sound is only accessible via particular methods, or, you could say, some methods lend themselves to making some sounds especially
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in the analog vs digital beef classic what people very like to do is fetishise the "analog sound warmth" and such, which at this point can easily be emulated, while the point should be much more about the specific ways of working your equipment lends itself to or even enforces upon you

and here there is not better or worse, no real metric to find for the sake of comparison
 
shakahislop

shakahislop

Well-known member
oval was a formative experience for me you're right. when i started reading the wire i'd read through the invisible jukeboxes and download all the songs from that i could find and burn them to a CD. oval is one of the ones that came to me that way. i was really into those two oval albums and the pole ones. i'd heard things that were derivative of those but not the original both of which are a less accessible and more extreme flavour of that kind of thing.

there is something going on with electronic music that i haven't been able to put my finger on and haven't seen other people manage to do so too which is that it's old enough now to have pretty clear differences between periods even across genres like there is a veneer on everything i hear from one period or another which makes it sound the same. late 90s for example the drums on everything sound the same they're very distinctive. right now so much of what i hear sounds like DAWs by which i mean it sounds like the machines are so powerful now or put another way the ease of the interfaces for the people using them makes loads of stuff sound the same. it's very easy to manipulate the sound and you hear it everywhere from sabrina carpenter to paula temple. stuff like oval sounds more accidental in the same way as scuzzy guitar feedback sounds accidental like the people making it have stumbled across it and are hoping to control it rather than having spend hours tweaking the kick sound layering in a thousand boring details using the sound design sound manipulation machine

different genre i was listening to a radiohead tune from 20006 on the bus this morning and it sounds like a harbinger of all of that it feels very constructed like samples strung together on a computer. even a lot of metal sounds like that at the moment all the sounds are very organized. i hear computer grids all the time everywhere. half the way you can think about music over the last like 50 years is what the computers are capable of doing and that's not the same now as it was ten years ago even it sounds like they can do anything at all. somehow that's created a uniformity to my ears anyway
 
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