OVAL - Forced Exposure

$25.00 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 8/29/2025

Originally released in 2023. "The music of Markus Popp is endlessly curious. Since the early '90s his pioneering albums as Oval have continually excavated new spaces in electronic music, leaving an indelible mark on the landscape. Popp's playful and singular approach to sound has continually left critics and peers alike confounded by his ability to conjure such lithe, evocative sonics from software. Celebrated collaborations with Jan St. Werner as Microstoria remain foundational texts in underground music, while a rare split record with Liturgy exemplifies Popp's reach and influence outside electronic spheres. His album Romantiq turns the producer's inquisitive ear to an omnipresent and yet oft ill-defined, even maligned area of music and art -- the romantic. The album foregrounds the emotional drive that has always been present in Oval records, providing a genuine and unabashed interrogation of its subject matter delivered with delectable sophistication. Romantiq evolved from an audio-visual collaboration with digital artist Robert Seidel for the grand opening of the German Romantic Museum in Frankfurt -- a huge outdoor projection covering the museum building. From the project's inception both Seidel and Popp sought a more expansive definition of 'romantic,' extending outward from the museum's comprehensive survey of the 19th-century epoch in art. Popp crafted dozens of short vignettes that each sought to evoke a specific mood or emotion in dialogue with Seidel's dense, intricate digital imagery and animations. From those initial foundations Popp continued to develop his initial sketches into something even more ambitious and diverse in its outlook. Romantiq surveys a staggering amount of source material, looking as much to literature, architecture and artistic traditions as it does music. Processed period instruments trace luxuriant spaces that shift from low-lit chambers to glistening palatial grandeur, glitching through past, present and future. Swelling atmospheres emerge like perfume, rich scents flooding the senses before evaporating on the breeze. Disparate traditional elements and romantic tropes are juxtaposed and recast into a future-seeking survey of ephemeral emotion. Throughout Romantiq, Popp masterfully blurs the line between the organic and digital, obscuring or revealing instruments in service of atmosphere."

$27.00 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 8/29/2025

Transparent red color vinyl. Originally released in 2023. "The music of Markus Popp is endlessly curious. Since the early '90s his pioneering albums as Oval have continually excavated new spaces in electronic music, leaving an indelible mark on the landscape. Popp's playful and singular approach to sound has continually left critics and peers alike confounded by his ability to conjure such lithe, evocative sonics from software. Celebrated collaborations with Jan St. Werner as Microstoria remain foundational texts in underground music, while a rare split record with Liturgy exemplifies Popp's reach and influence outside electronic spheres. His album Romantiq turns the producer's inquisitive ear to an omnipresent and yet oft ill-defined, even maligned area of music and art -- the romantic. The album foregrounds the emotional drive that has always been present in Oval records, providing a genuine and unabashed interrogation of its subject matter delivered with delectable sophistication. Romantiq evolved from an audio-visual collaboration with digital artist Robert Seidel for the grand opening of the German Romantic Museum in Frankfurt -- a huge outdoor projection covering the museum building. From the project's inception both Seidel and Popp sought a more expansive definition of 'romantic,' extending outward from the museum's comprehensive survey of the 19th-century epoch in art. Popp crafted dozens of short vignettes that each sought to evoke a specific mood or emotion in dialogue with Seidel's dense, intricate digital imagery and animations. From those initial foundations Popp continued to develop his initial sketches into something even more ambitious and diverse in its outlook. Romantiq surveys a staggering amount of source material, looking as much to literature, architecture and artistic traditions as it does music. Processed period instruments trace luxuriant spaces that shift from low-lit chambers to glistening palatial grandeur, glitching through past, present and future. Swelling atmospheres emerge like perfume, rich scents flooding the senses before evaporating on the breeze. Disparate traditional elements and romantic tropes are juxtaposed and recast into a future-seeking survey of ephemeral emotion. Throughout Romantiq, Popp masterfully blurs the line between the organic and digital, obscuring or revealing instruments in service of atmosphere."

$21.00 IN STOCK

LP version. White vinyl. Includes large, fold-out poster (60 x 60 cm). Oval's album Popp started as a concept album. It was neither meant as a pop record nor as "the Markus Popp signature album". At first, Popp was all about playing around. And about changing the musical outlook from the earlier hyper-detailed, improvisational Oval style to straight-up sequencing, old-school glitch tricks and beat-making. Popp explains, "Working on these new 'club tracks' was like going from cucina povera (my 1990s student-budget glitch style) and hi-tech fusion cuisine (post-2010) to feeling like a vegan who just stumbled into a barbecue seminar." Popp is a relentless, euphoric love letter to a musical utopia: kaleidoscopic and soulful, optimistic and grandiose. No matter if you choose to trace the many exhilarating, meandering melodies ("RE", "ID"), or if you prefer to dance to the housy information overload of "AI" and "LO", Popp is simply a joy to listen to. The newly introduced, intricate "fantasy vocals" are another new through line in Oval's music: weaving a blissful, sensual, "post-R&B"-narrative beyond words ("KU", "LO", "VE"). Ghosts of vintage Oval glitch stylings ("FU", "MY", "MO") are met with swooning strings, dreamy bells, 1990s rave stabs, angular bass lines and polyrhythmic beats. The atmosphere can even border on the solemn ("SA"), cinematic ("CA") or even hymn-like ("VE") before dissolving into these unstoppable, multi-layered loop-scapes. Popp explains further, "However complex and insanely technical my tracks may ever be getting, I will always make sure they sound organic, as if they're running on nothing but sheer imagination." Popp is released on Uovooo, a new label run by Markus Popp. Markus Popp's early, now legendary album releases sent shockwaves through the "electronica" landscape in the late 1990's - introducing a unique, innovative digital sound and production aesthetic. With an undeniable instinct for the pleasantly irritating, the drastic and the dreamy, Popp pioneered "glitch" and "clicks & cuts", inspiring and provoking an entire generation of musicians to this day. After a long hiatus, Oval returned in 2010, changing the game all over again with a new, groundbreaking "hyperreal" style, blurring the lines between the electronic auteur and (virtual) "band music". The distinctive, organic appeal of Oval tracks, remixes and albums have brought along several watershed moments for the entire genre.

$15.50 IN STOCK

Oval's album Popp started as a concept album. It was neither meant as a pop record nor as "the Markus Popp signature album". At first, Popp was all about playing around. And about changing the musical outlook from the earlier hyper-detailed, improvisational Oval style to straight-up sequencing, old-school glitch tricks and beat-making. Popp explains, "Working on these new 'club tracks' was like going from cucina povera (my 1990s student-budget glitch style) and hi-tech fusion cuisine (post-2010) to feeling like a vegan who just stumbled into a barbecue seminar." Popp is a relentless, euphoric love letter to a musical utopia: kaleidoscopic and soulful, optimistic and grandiose. No matter if you choose to trace the many exhilarating, meandering melodies ("RE", "ID"), or if you prefer to dance to the housy information overload of "AI" and "LO", Popp is simply a joy to listen to. The newly introduced, intricate "fantasy vocals" are another new through line in Oval's music: weaving a blissful, sensual, "post-R&B"-narrative beyond words ("KU", "LO", "VE"). Ghosts of vintage Oval glitch stylings ("FU", "MY", "MO") are met with swooning strings, dreamy bells, 1990s rave stabs, angular bass lines and polyrhythmic beats. The atmosphere can even border on the solemn ("SA"), cinematic ("CA") or even hymn-like ("VE") before dissolving into these unstoppable, multi-layered loop-scapes. Popp explains further, "However complex and insanely technical my tracks may ever be getting, I will always make sure they sound organic, as if they're running on nothing but sheer imagination." Popp is released on Uovooo, a new label run by Markus Popp. Markus Popp's early, now legendary album releases sent shockwaves through the "electronica" landscape in the late 1990's - introducing a unique, innovative digital sound and production aesthetic. With an undeniable instinct for the pleasantly irritating, the drastic and the dreamy, Popp pioneered "glitch" and "clicks & cuts", inspiring and provoking an entire generation of musicians to this day. After a long hiatus, Oval returned in 2010, changing the game all over again with a new, groundbreaking "hyperreal" style, blurring the lines between the electronic auteur and (virtual) "band music". The distinctive, organic appeal of Oval tracks, remixes and albums have brought along several watershed moments for the entire genre. CD version comes in a digisleeve.

$19.50 IN STOCK

In many ways, O, released on Thrill Jockey after a nine-year break, was a second debut album for Markus Popp aka Oval. A radical break with old concepts and methods, a new beginning. While Popp's artistic approach in the 1990s and early 2000s was more of a structural, theoretical nature, O was just about the music itself. Themes such as the means of production, limitations, dogma and concept took a back seat to a musical sensibility. Instead of writing new software to synthesize and process sounds, for O, Popp dove into the heart of our preset-culture. He acquired a standard PC and only used the pre-installed sounds and plug-ins. With this ready-to-play machine and conventional musical instruments like the guitar and drums, a new chapter in the story of Oval was written. DNA is a mountain of an album: an audio CD with 25 tracks, each about three minutes long. Some are no longer than a minute. Here you'll find a collection of rare Oval pieces and 12 previously-unreleased tracks. DNA is a mixture of music from Markus Popp's various creative phases. It's surprising how old and new meld seamlessly together, and how, for Oval, formalism and musicality have produced similar results. Markus Popp has found an unmistakable musical language and declined it from A to Z. DNA, so to say, is the accompanying dictionary. Originally, this album was supposed to appear before O and conclude the "electronic" phase of Oval. DNA is intoxicating and wonderful. There is the intensive guitar work of the new pieces, an eruptive bundle of sounds, the sparkle and shimmer of high tones. The simultaneousness of countless events, unbelievably dense and at the same time secretly light. Disc 2 of DNA is almost something like an Open Source Manifesto: It contains the SoundBrowser/Sequenzer-Software OvalDNA and more than 2,000 Oval Sounds from various phases of Popp's work as individual AIFF files. The software and sound files are intended for music producers and are available to all without restrictions. Also included is a video documentation of PlayGroundTV/Madrid, the Glass UFO music video by AmberleyProductions/Berlin and 10 bonus tracks for the OvalDNA album as WAV files.

$17.00 LOW STOCK LEVEL

"O is the first new Oval album in nearly a decade, a striking 70-track double CD and the follow up to May's sold-out Oh EP (THR 012.44EP) by electronic pioneer Markus Popp. Popp lives and works in Berlin. He took time off after his last release in 2003 under the moniker So, wanting this new material to be a radical departure from his old concepts and methods on all levels, to essentially be a new 'debut' album. For O, Popp's creative process shares nothing with his creative process for prior Oval albums. Previously, Popp focused on the creation of the programs that would process sound and effectively create the music, a process that was more theoretical in nature. For O, Popp uses an instrument that is very common, a stock PC outfitted with stock sounds and plug-ins. On the 2CD version of O, disc 1 features twenty relatively longer pieces that range from delicate, sophisticated pop to brutally torn, electro-acoustic riffing full of angular, colliding guitar sounds. All of the songs are peppered with expressive and open drumming. Disc 2 features fifty concise, highly detailed pieces that are a conscious nod to the culture of instant gratification. These tracks represent Popp's personal challenge to create pieces within a constrained framework that addresses this aspect of music culture. Popp has even referred to these pieces as ringtones. These one-minute tracks have a melodic finesse and associative power that are unexpected under such constraints and are ripe for future sampling projects."

$31.00 IN STOCK

Japanese version of the new Oval album (released in the US on Thrill Jockey), with 4 bonus tracks exclusive to this release ("Excel", "Newslo", Stueck" & "K-Sum"). "Markus Popp, a.k.a. Oval, is a mastermind of digital technology. Ovalprocess continues his elaborate manifesto of electronic music coupled with multimedia wizardry. This new release from Oval is a flowing, textured manuscript that utilizes sublime low end rhythm and directive pulsation in a manner that eases the listener into a soft and pillowy world dominated by electronic bleeps, glitches and moans. Ovalprocess equally represents an innovative music software application, designed by Popp, as much as it serves as the core engine to an innovative Oval sound installation. The installation is centered around one or several publicly accessible sound terminals running the Ovalprocess application, rendering the exhibit a customizable, collaborative workspace. Making the installation accessible in a public space is the ideal aesthetic that Popp craves-he feels it is far more effective than offering a CDRom or another option that would make the application available on a more individual basis. The Ovalprocess installation allows the public to use sounds that are found on the album to produce their own Oval-like music. His latest release displays Popp's talent at developing a deep and complex groove with seemingly difficult tools. Ovalprocess is best enjoyed at a loud volume. Oval's rich and round tones provide a Siren-like lure that is irresistible."