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Dec 16, 2010With O, Markus Pop has reinvented Oval using new techniques to produce a challenging sound world that's simultaneously exhausting and fascinating.
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Dec 16, 2010So even though Popp's new sound palette seems like a step back, the way he uses it is as au courant as an oil-soaked pelican. O is not a retro move, but the work of an artist dealing with the now.
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Dec 16, 2010The music has a thoughtful, reflective quality in spite of its brevity. Popp claims he is not an "anti-musician", and given the lush, enveloping atmosphere of much of O, his claim seems fair. He is, however, very much anti-convention.
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Dec 16, 2010Although the music came out of a computer, it's decidedly unmechanical. Loops and metronomic repetitions are far outnumbered by impulses and spasms, stops and starts. Each track could be a separate Petri dish, testing how selected musical organisms interact.
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Dec 16, 2010The big difference on this two-disc set, however, is the occasional, recognizable drum pattern, mostly snare strikes or cymbal crashes, that give the rest of the music a wider dynamic range.
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Dec 16, 2010Popp has once again authored a unique and compelling work. How you decide to sort through it and work it into your own life is up to you.
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Dec 16, 2010It's lovely, it's pleasantly unsettling, and there's a hell of a lot of it.
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Jan 31, 2011Once again, the limits of music and musicianship are foregrounded in Popp's relentless pursuit of the horizon afforded by a particular disposition of limits: the limits of imagination, of technology, of process, the organic and the inorganic.
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Dec 16, 2010At 70 tracks, O is bloated, and the differences between songs and discs are so slight as to not much matter, though they do exist.
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Dec 16, 2010Popp sounds as if he's having a ten-year-old argument with himself, and though he's certainly earned the right to make the point that this argument still holds currency, O is less than convincing.