Markus Popp has crafted some of the more interesting and complex minimal electro in recent years. The pinnacle of his earlier work came with the mid 90’s pair of releases Systemische and 94 Diskont, which rose to the pinnacle of pastoral glitchy soundscapes. Then a trio, the music was centered around worship of the accidental; they would take cds of crafted samples, scratch them up and re-sample the results. Through a heavy amount of processing, what could easily be incredibly harsh becomes a warm bath of digital tones backed by discreet rhythms made of pops and skips. Now primarily the sole work of Popp, with former bandmate Frank Metzger handling the design work, he’s back after nearly a decade off with a new spin on the Oval music.

The surprises some early in Oh, the most recent EP release from Oval, clearly detailed in the opening track ‘Hey’. After an initially calm 2 minutes of synth wash and glitchy tones bouncing around the track, a clear burst of drums rounds out the mix. Such distinct instrumentation was rarely found on earlier works, but the kinetic flourishes and free jazz fills match the energy of the lead melody and don’t come across as too jarring.

The third track ‘Grrr’ feels a bit darker, like a fax machine drunkenly crooning Standards-era Tortoise. Comparisons to the band are fair, as Popp is now labelmates wth Tortoise and much of the US probably first grew aware of Oval via their mid-ninties remixes for the band. Spazzy, almost digital interpretations of guitar fed through a variety of filters and finely chopped become the lead, making for something at once soothing and jarring,

The latter half of the EP is slightly more traditional Oval, featuring more abstract tone poems: as much meditations on style as they are functioning songs. Taking improvised sounding fret tapping and layering in digital elements, ultimately what is created is something that tricks the ear. Any attempt to consciously recognize what is organic and what is electronic becomes an empty quest and it’s best to simply be tugged along by the flow. Some of the shorter songs may feel like they end abruptly, but you’re left with a satisfying listen and some anticipation towards next month’s full length O.

Here’s one of less beat driven, more abstract songs from Oh:

OVAL – KASTELL 4

The cover art, affixed as a hand glued card to the 1,000 piece limited run vinyl comes from a still of ‘From Here To Ear’ (2007) by French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Video of the piece made the blog rounds earlier this year:

The installation is a walk through of an aviary populated by Zebra finches and plugged in electric guitars. As the birds do what birds do, as well react to the passing guests, they muck about with strings and frets doing their best to cover early Sonic Youth. There’s some correlation between Boursier-Mougenot’s piece and both the technical approach and tonal structure of Oval. The random flecks of tone and the abstract routes melody take can be found thoughout Popp’s catalog as well in ‘From Here To Ear’. The use of a still from the piece is the only connection however, as Disquet found out from a Thrill Jockey rep that Boursier-Mougenot has no involvement with the music and he just allowed use of the image.

While I’m on the subject, take a look at Hanes Broecker’s ‘Drink Away The Art,’ a piece which pretty much functions as the title implies while still remaining interesting.

Oh was released June 15th, 2010 via Thrill Jockey. The first pressing of the EP, which was pressed on 150 gram white vinyl and featured a hand glued still from Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s ‘From Here To Ear’ has sold out. Check back with Thrill Jockey to see when it is repressed, though you can get it digitally from the label as well. Oval’s next release come in early September and will be a double disk/vinyl full length that will feature 70 songs, a sample of which can be found over at Disquet.

There’s a lot contained below the surface of Eskimo Snow and what’s underneath is not entirely an uplifting affair. The album, which was released in late September on Anticon Records, is almost completely devoid of the hip-hop sheen that glossed both Elephant Eyelash and Alopecia and what is left settles with much more heft and weight. Much of the humorous subtext is gone as well, though the wordplay left behind is no less clever. The album gives off the air of a defeated narrator, be it Yoni himself or the character he’s woven into the band’s three albums, someone who has laid down his arms in light of the arriving war. The first two albums settled a mixture of reaction to the world around him with wry commentary, Elephant Eyelash brimming with a bit more uptempo sadness followed by Alopecia’s growing frustration. Put in context, the core of Eskimo Snow, in both lyrics and music is something more introspective

I had the pleasure of interviewing Yoni back in early 2006 just before one of their opening shows for The Silver Jews at Chicago’s Double Door. The read I got off him then was a sincere one, as he was a genuinely kind and grounded guy who spoke with as much sincerity off the stage as he did in his lyrics. Between then and now, one has to assume that as you progress as a person of interest in the public eye, there is a divergence between the self you present in your art and the self you live. Over the course of the last two albums, it’s safe to guess that more of a ‘narrative interpretation of Yoni’ has crept into the lyrics. The process of exposing yourself through your art, especially to the extreme that he does can create two representations of one’s self. Even with those ideas are taken into account, Alopecia and Eskimo Snow were born of the same recording sessions, so to say that there’s an evolution over time could be a less than true guess.

Character analysis aside, when you take away the hip-hop sway and gloss humor, what’s left at the core is a dense affair. The same themes of morality, self image, and mortality run through the core of this record. The songs stand strong individually despite the brief length of some, like the hypnotic album opener These Hands. This pairs a rising coo of discordant backup vocals with Yoni’s comparison of his own life’s progress to his father’s. The deep reverb on his voice paired with the lonely piano chords makes for something that creeps under the skin and at under two minutes is gone before you really recognize what is going on.

Why? – These Hands

Another highlight rests with Into The Shadows Of My Embrace, which leans on a swirl of keyboards and xylophone as it marches toward an almost melodramatic musical and lyrical peak where he sings about the extreme of his confessional nature. The kind of straight pop style that he uses in songs like this and Alopecia’s Simeon’s Dilemma and Brook & Waxing were a shift in style that I had to really wrap my head around, but the way they’re executed it grows on you.

Why? – Into the Shadows of My Embrace

With the tour supporting this album, there was a pretty interesting shift in the band’s setup. My last show in Portland was them with the charmingly enigmatic Phil Elverum, this time doing what could best be described as epic Anacortes sludge metal. Why?’s live setup for this tour featured Andrew Broder and Mark Erickson of Fog, so that the full band that participated in the Eskimo Snow and Alopecia recording sessions was present. Earlier tours, they’d shift up the arrangement and subtract elements to perform the songs live, but the full roster of folks on stage allowed for a pretty fair recreation of the album’s sound, down to the barely there backup vocals on Against Me which I always chalked up to reverb. Usually, Yoni would have a setup of a snare drum and a keyboard hooked up to a few effects pedals, but now he was able to function more as a lead man, free to move around the stage untethered. Overall, the show was the most solid and confidant I’ve seen them yet, a reflection on the changes musically and lyrically on the album.

Ultimately, Eskimo Snow chopped up snippets of someone’s life, very much not my own, but the emotion behind it all rings true with me. The feeling of frustration and exhaustion, that I feel a lot of people are suffering through as the world lets loose what could only be described as a massive economic sigh. The emotional pull of the album is more important than the specifics of musical influences or which track hides the cleverest lyric, as Eskimo Snow yields a rewarding listen weather you take the stories as truth or fragments of Mr. Wolf’s own mythos.

Eskimo Snow was released by Anticon Records on September 22nd 2009