Oval (musical project)

Oval is an electronic music group founded in Germany in 1991 by Markus Popp, Sebastian Oschatz, Frank Metzger and Holger Lindmüller. The group pioneered glitch music, writing on CDs to damage them and produce music with the resulting fragments. The project has been a solo venture by Popp since the departure of other members in 1995.

Oval
Background information
Origin	Germany
Genres	Electronic glitch ambient experimental microsound IDM
Years active	1991–present
Labels	Thrill Jockey (U.S.) Mille Plateaux (Europe)
Members	Markus Popp
Past members	Sebastian Oschatz Frank Metzger Holger Lindmüller

History

Oval was founded in 1991 by Markus Popp, Sebastian Oschatz, Frank Metzger, and Holger Lindmüller. Disdaining the use of synthesizers, Oval instead deliberately mutilated CDs by writing on them with felt pens, then processed samples of fragmented sounds to create a very rhythmic electronic style.

Holger Lindmüller left about 1993, and Oval became a trio at that time. Oschatz and Metzger left the group in 1995, with Popp continuing under the Oval name. After a series of releases on Thrill Jockey and Form & Function in the late 1990s and early 2000s Oval was on hiatus until 2010, when the EP Oh was released. The first Oval album in almost a decade, titled O, was released later the same year, on Thrill Jockey. In March 2013, Oval released a sixteen-track album titled Calidostópia!, a project was funded by the Goethe Institute and the Cultural Foundation of the State of Bahia. Later that same year he released VOA (2013), an album that also emerged from the collaboration with singers and musicians from South America.

In 2016, Popp started his own label, UOVOOO. Its first release was French artist Mei's twelve-track album Partura and the second being Oval's eleven-track album Popp.

Other works

Markus Popp was an integral part of the creation of Gastr Del Sol's 1998 album Camoufleur. In 2003 his collaboration with Japanese singer Eriko Toyoda, entitled So, was released on Thrill Jockey. He also composed the soundtrack for a short film Retina.

Frank Metzger released some singles with Mego and the Internet label Falsch, and started a collaboration with Rossano Polidoro and Emiliano Romanelli from "TU M'" in 2003 called Steno. 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.

Awards

• 2015 QWARTZ Award "Lifetime Achievement Award"
• 2013 QWARTZ Award "Best Experimental Music"
• 2011 Prix Ars Electronica Honorable Mention
• 2001 Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction

Discography

Albums

• Wohnton (Ata Tak/1993)
• Systemisch (Mille Plateaux/1994)
• 94 Diskont (Mille Plateaux/1995)
• Dok (Thrill Jockey/1998)
• Ovalprocess (Form and Function/2000)
• Pre/Commers (Thrill Jockey/2001)
• Ovalcommers (Form and Function/2001)
• O (Thrill Jockey/2010)
• OvalDNA (Shitkatapult/2011)
• Calidostópia! (Goethe Institute/2013)
• Voa (2013)
• Popp (UOVOOO/2016)
• Scis (UOVOOO/2020)
• Ovidono (UOVOOO/2022)
• Romantiq (Thrill Jockey/2023)

Extended Plays

• Szenariodisk (Thrill Jockey/1999)
• Oh (Thrill Jockey/2010)
• Eksploio (UOVOOO/2020)

Compilation albums

• I Said No Doctors! with various artists (Dymaxion Groove, 2017)

See also

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

External links

• Markus Popp Interview by Marc Weidenbaum, Disquiet, 1997
• Markus Popp Interview by Sam Inglis, Sound on Sound, 2002
• Markus Popp Interview by David Sullivan, Cyclic Defrost, 2016
• Markus Popp account on Twitter
• Oval discography at Discogs
• Oval profile at Bandcamp