Markus Popp knows very well that finding his first musical success at the cusp of a sound critics declare to be something new has been as much a curse as it is a blessing. His work as Oval during the 90s received widespread recognition and acclaim, and through no effort on his part, his name came to be associated with the term glitch.
At the time his music was a sort of mosaic built from tiny, imperfect sonic scraps that he set in place to create the sonic landscapes he envisioned. But Oval disappeared around the turn of the century as Popp spent much of the last decade approaching his music from a new direction and finding new starting points from which to initiate his compositions.
After returning with a series of new Oval releases on Thrill Jockey earlier this year, the Berlin-based Popp played a handful of live sets in the United States and sat down with Urb prior to his headlining slot at the inaugural Sonar Chicago festival to talk about his new music and why he thinks the techniques and instruments used to make music are almost unimportant when assessing the impact of the music itself.
When talking about the music he first made as Oval in the 90s, Popp compares the process to the making of an animated movie with songs, “composed almost frame by frame from these tiny fragments of sound.” It was the use of these tiny and unrefined samples to construct his songs that tied together Oval with the burgeoning style that came to be known as glitch, but to him it was just about making music with the tools he had at hand.
“These tracks were also songs, it was just that they were constructed from the most unlikely building blocks, but they were totally linear, and they were totally musical and they were totally emotion driven,” he said.
“My music in the 90s was very much about process and workflow and software, and that said, it was also about songs. You could even say this love letter to music that people are seeing in this new record, that love letter might already have been written like a long time ago, even at the time I was doing the other records. It is just only now it becomes visible what the contents of this love letter was, or who sent it.”
That love letter is his way of approaching music, which he surrounds himself with in one form or another all the time. His recent releases are just his latest expression of that and in some ways they’re more easily approachable, yet no less challenging than his previous work.
Instruments come in more recognizable forms and while the arrangements are certainly as original as ever, the jagged edges bits of noise are far less prevalent. Popp said he never felt any connection or dedication to the concept of glitch and has naturally progressed as a musician, with his new Oval music, “a total radical departure from how I did things before.”
“For the new material, I took a different approach, but the goal was the same. I wanted to cram as much visual associative power and emotion into the smallest possible space and this time the building blocks were completely different,” he explained.
The EP Oh and album O both feature spacious arrangements of ringing guitar strings, keyboards, jazz-inspired percussions and countless other elements that add up to make abstract soundscapes that float between soothing and frenetic. Some of these songs drift into shape in their own time, while others come and go quickly in a microflash of arranged noise.
He described the difference in creating his newer music as having progressed from working with loops to working with riffs and he now feels more fully in control of every aspect of every sound he works with which makes him more deeply involved as a composer rather than just as an arranger.
Popp said this newfound freedom made him feel like he had more power in creating the latest Oval material because the musical tools at his disposal provided a limitless set of possibilities, and more than ever before he had to first figure out where he wanted to start. With his latest works and the one-minute blasts of sound that make up many of the songs, Popp feels he’s really created something to be proud of.
“I think it’s really me trying to again, in my German kind of fashion to say here in this one minute is like everything you could ever expect in a super emotional piece of music,” he said. “I really want to deliver a space, almost like a location and place a certain emotion in that location. Every track is sort of like its own short story, or like a still from a move, and all these stills are very different things you can see.”
Popp talked about playing demo versions of his new music for friends and asking them to close their eyes while listening and then tell him what they thought about. He was amazed at the range of connections people brought to his music and felt very humbled by having reached some of these listeners on deep emotional levels.
Those emotional responses are real, they are the real point of the music, he explained while talking about why it doesn’t matter if the guitar sounds he uses came from a guitar or a computer, and it doesn’t matter if noise in a song is sampled or played live on the spot.
“It should be music that is beyond these kind of questions and distinctions. I just wanted to make music that is really just there. You don’t need to discuss how it’s made,” he said while explaining that he used both live instrumentation and digital instruments in making music that he thinks could be considered a sort of “acoustic illusion.”
“The virtual instrument with all the options it gives, it’s going way beyond the pure emulation of the real physical instrument it’s designed to emulate,” he said.
“It evokes all sorts of questions, like is guitar music only guitar music if you see someone playing guitar, or if you at least have a YouTube video looking like someone was playing guitar. What is actually making it work, what actually triggers this emotion in us of this nostalgic feeling of someone playing guitar.”
He returned to a movie analogy to explain that just like in a CGI-enhanced movie where the action on the screen might or might not have been actually captured by a camera, the audience makes no distinctions in how it experiences these digital creations. It’s the final creation that matters most, and Popp feels liberated from his past and very pleased with his latest creative efforts as Oval.
“I use all sort of techniques, but most import is the result.”
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