Oval

The German experimental outfit Oval bore much of the responsibility for defining glitch as a standalone category of electronic music. Although avant-garde composers had already drawn upon the noises emitted by skipping compact discs and defective hardware, Oval folded those elements into ambient and downtempo works, most notably the landmark 1995 album 94diskont., thereby establishing the template for the “clicks and cuts” aesthetic. What began as a collective later became identified almost exclusively with founding member Markus Popp, who went on to issue solo recordings while also supplying remixes for acts such as Tortoise and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Over time the project moved beyond its initial approach, introducing live instruments on the more electro-acoustic O (2010) and then shifting toward maximalist club music with the 2016 release Popp and the 2020 album Scis. Romantiq, drawn from an audio-visual installation created for the opening of the German Romantic Museum in Frankfurt, surfaced in 2023.

Established in Darmstadt, Germany, during 1991, Oval first circulated its music on cassettes passed among acquaintances. The lineup at that stage comprised Popp, Holger Lindmüller, Frank Metzger, and Sebastian Oschatz. Lindmüller exited before the group’s proper debut album, Wohnton, which appeared on Ata Tak in 1993. Following the Mille Plateaux releases Systemisch in 1994 and 94diskont. in 1995, Metzger and Oschatz departed, leaving Popp to carry the project forward. The method he refined came to be known as “prepared compact disc,” in which manually marred and scarified CDs were played and sampled to generate their somewhat randomly patterned rhythmic clicking. When these textures were combined with subtle, sparse melodies and quirky electronics, the results proved as oddly musical as they were simply peculiar. Popp’s remixes for the Chicago post-rock group Tortoise helped introduce his work to American listeners, after which Oval’s 1994 and 1995 albums, along with his Microstoria output alongside Mouse on Mars’ Jan St. Werner, were issued in the U.S. by Thrill Jockey. Additional activities in the latter half of the decade encompassed 1998’s Dok, which incorporated contributions from Christophe Charles, and several short-form releases.

Popp’s output remained intermittent throughout the 2000s and 2010s, yet 2000 and 2001 ranked among his most productive periods, yielding the three Oval albums Ovalprocess, Pre/Commers, and Ovalcommers plus two Microstoria albums. Under the alias So he joined vocalist Eriko Toyoda for a self-titled album issued in 2003. Oval stayed inactive for several years until O (2010), which was followed by a split LP with Liturgy (2011). OvalDNA (2011), issued on Shitkatapult, reworked material from the Oval catalog and included a DVD. Calidostópia! (2013) stood as Popp’s most adventurous undertaking to date, the product of transporting recent finished and unfinished pieces to Brazil for transformation through added vocalists; the companion album Voa appeared later that year. A limited cassette titled September was released in 2014.

In 2016 Oval adopted an unexpectedly club-oriented stance on the colorful, maximalist album Popp, which Popp issued on his own Uovooo label. Returning to Thrill Jockey, the project sustained this direction with the 2019 EP Eksploio and the 2020 full-length Scis. Shifting back toward an electro-acoustic and ambient palette, Ovidono—a collaboration with artist Vlatka Alec that also featured vocals by Toyoda—emerged in 2021. Romantiq, an album of glitchy chamber music created with digital artist Robert Seidel for the opening of Frankfurt’s German Romantic Museum, was released by Thrill Jockey in 2023.