Oval – DNA
Shitkatapult
It’s been over 30 years since The Slits recorded their 11-minute spiritual epic ‘In the Beginning’ for Radio One. In articulating her developing spirituality through African roots music, frontwoman Ari Up pronounced rhythm as the foundation of all things. Maybe that’s a big call but on a philosophical level, even a mathematical one, she has a point. After all, dynamical systems are a pretty sweet theory of everything; from the movement of a molecule to the shifting seasonal cycles. Or, as the late Ms Up put it, “the seasons, and the weather and the climate iiiiiis rhythm!”
Where exactly are we going with all of this? Well, granted, glitch-pioneer Markus Popp and his eleventh release under the moniker Oval, sounds a far cry from the elemental reggae-inspired beats of London’s post-punk era Amazonians. But there’s something to be said for the sparse electronica of DNA and the synthetic means by which it finds entirely organic sounds.
Noted for developing the ‘Clicks & Cuts’ aesthetic of sound, rhythm and even melody found in abused digital audio equipment in the early ’90s, DNA is an extended retrospective of Oval’s 20-year lifespan after nearly a decade of silence. Perhaps it was a shrewd move on Popp’s part — where the album, and its fascination with all things musique concrete, returns to capitalise on the hyperlinked modern world’s craze for the black arts of New Media. Accordingly, the compilation covers the progress and evolution of Oval’s music from the theoretical structure of his earlier work, before breaking form and focussing on software-as-music with 2010 release O.
Twenty-five tracks of rare and unreleased material run for over an hour and follow along fluctuating trails that are more rhizomes of sound than songs in any traditional sense of the word. As compositions that could just as easily be an amplified field recording of nature in flux, a clattering echo flitters across an ambient soundscape as a cockroach would a kitchen table in ‘Alpen’, an insistent drone hovering in and out of the funereal atmosphere. A cinematic score skips to the point of being unrecognisable in ’70 Kino’, offering a heightened sense of urgency, while ‘Pockyrocky’ engages in the futile search for melody — one not yet fully formed groove gives way to another, chasing the impossible goal of a traditionally man-made song construction. Instead, each track starts at a plateau and stays there, at times hinting at the unnatural human drive for a beginning and an end, but eventually offering little more than an abrupt stop to these snapshots into the life cycles of inanimate objects. Where Christian Marclay attempted to free music from the confines of format through his Recycled Records series of the ’80s, Popp liberated technology from its predestined functionality in the ’90s, thus establishing what a wise band once called “plastic rhythm”. Steph Kretowicz
