"oh la la, this year got off to a rough start. Being rushed into the hospital ER & undergoing life-saving surgery at the 11th hour was not exactly my idea of kicking off 2014." Nor most people's. So, to acknowledge the global support this grim event inspired, Oval (Markus Popp) invites you to tap the restlessly inventive riches - twangingly brittle to gauzily flooding - of his Bandcamp collection: all except the recent Voa set at 'name your price' until 12pm CET tonight - though he unsurprisingly invites donations, given the "astronomical" medical bill in prospect...
A few alluring highlights:
Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
Talking of Oval, a sandblast from the past - a woozily abrasive track of the day from his monumental Ovalprocessalbum (Zomba, 2000 - stream in full below, along with the following year's Ovalcommers).
Blurb: "Ovalprocess 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."
Blurb: "Popp describes Ovalcommers as a 3D musical obstacle course, a friendly and accessible invitation to complexity. Ovalcommers surprises with poetic and playful elements (organs and layers of guitar feedback), making room for understatement, sophistication and a new, almost absentmindedly casual atmosphere. Haunting emulations of processed brass, string and woodwind sections are carefully added to the otherwise still angular desktop rock. Listeners will leave Ovalcommers with a new perspective on Oval in general, as Popp's strategy becomes clearly visible: A friendly, yet relentless fanaticism to experiment and innovate musically."
Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
Let's party like it's 1998*. The soundtrack? A sudden, notable eruption of new music from the near-holy trinity of Jan Jelinek, Oval and Pole, three pioneering titans of experimental electronica.
Jelinek has just launched only his second release as Farben since 2004 - a self-released 12" of deviant disco, like its predecessor. Stefan Betke is about to unleash his first as Pole in several years (also his debut under his own label & again a 12").
Meanwhile, the past year's outpouring of Markus Popp's reinvented Oval is poised to continue with - somewhat unimaginably, given his torrential recent output - the 'lost tracks' of OvalDNA. In contrast to his peers' vinyl-clad modesty, Popp's maximal "much more than a regular music CD" package is also to include a DVD & software).
To these ears, Popp's playful, textured workouts are particularly compelling. Inevitably, though, Farben's warped loops & Pole's bassy warmth offer much as well.
Anyway, the comparison is probably witless & certainly unfair. OvalDNA excavates 17 years in unearthing its 35 tracks, even if some are recognisably of the zithery, twangy 'new' Oval (others are clearly not, as inspired glitches like Gegenlesen & Savvy below underline - "I am almost sure there will be a lot to like about this record, especially for fans of the classic Oval sound," Popp says).
Jelinek & Betke's releases document their notable efforts to still be making new music after all this time. Still, OvalDNA manages to sound rather more contemporary than either (despite being the opposite, of course) - perhaps reflecting the constraints imposed by Farben & Pole's closer adherence to genres, especially Betke's willingness to keep mining dub techno tropes. Happily, Jelinek seems to smuggle in a little breadth to his palette from the Oramic sci fi territory he's been exploring as Ursula Bogner.
Blurb: "As the next step in the evolution of a legendary producer, on September 1st 2011, Stefan Betke is founding a new artist label named “pole.”
Made for the music of pole, this new imprint will keep Betke’s large back catalogue available, as well as give his forthcoming releases an autonomous structure for experimentation and creativity. For over a decade, Stefan Betke has been working as a label owner, publisher and mastering engineer, contributing his experience to the development of electronic music. The artist label “pole” is intended to create a place where pole´s original and unique sound can be developed further, and combined with new production methods and ideas. In the second half of 2011, pole will re-release his full back catalogue digitally, including classical records such as “1,2,3,” “Steingarten” and “Steingarten remixes,” as well as his new music on a series of 12 inches released on vinyl and digital.
As Pole puts it: “My new music will sound very warm, has a lot of bass and stands in a strong relation to my musical history."
Pole photo by Kai von Rabenau. Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
For all his digi-fidgety clicks’n’cuttings, Pleq is clearly a Proper Musician. Pleq’s effects come from felicitous juxtaposition of chilly and warm, sharp and delicate, warped and winsome, with a penchant for the addition of a peculiar or plangent ingredient. Bartosz Dziadosz, for Pleq is he, has been active only since 2008, but prolific enough to have accumulated a small pile, incl. releases on u-cover, Databloem, dataObscura, October Man, Basses Frequences, and Impulsive Art. Pleq's style is self-designated “Glitch & Melancholy,” which, however shorthand, effectively identifies - sonically and emotionally - much of what he’s about. His stock-in-trade is basically atmospheric minimal electronica, though with the addition of something somehow off-kilter, malfunctioning, be it a clunk, a pop, or some other errorist artefact.
Most recent offering, Sound of Rebirth (Impulsive Art) is in some ways a case study in contemporary post-digital stylistics. “Black Dog (feat. hiiro-tent)” sets the tone with a sulky and sultry combo of lounge-noir piano, wisps of smokey vocal, against which woody clunks and bits of digital grit rub up nervously.
This Pole may or may not know of Pole, but seems to like to traffic in a similar studied junkshop strategy of recycling of studio effluvia and offcuts of digital detritus to create spidery webs of percussive matter; these feature heavily as he ramps up his early patter into clatter in the slithery Autechresque machine-funk derivative, “Hackneyed Words.”
No, young Bartosz is not the cheeriest of souls, as the presence of titles like “A Very Gentle Death” will testify, and his signature sound is largely a glum downbeat affair, though undeniably enlivened with pared-back jazz-inflected tropes, queasy ambience and spectral pulse. The title track is an excellently evocative creation, ripe for plucking for a poignant film scene, plangent synth motif and sad piano (D minor?), lightly stroked and stoked by cymbaline infusions and digi-fizz:
Re: previously mentioned juxtapositional sleight of hand, see how the sweet and tuneful colludes with the glitchy’n’scratchy in an eerie’n’inky ambiance with crepuscular keys (ft. haunting femme vox) on “Raindrop”:
Before that, though, there’s the resonant cadences of “Swell Bliss (Downtempo Edition),” which takes its unsuspecting ‘downtempo’ tag and bypasses any headnod chillout areas to throw it into a drowning pool with a weighty ballast of sorrowful strings in Murcofian micro-mope mode:
