Shitkatapult, 
CD+DVD
, Strike134, 2011
It took a decade to Markus Popp/Oval to return and release another album (“O”) which radically changed its approach towards more classical sounds (with drums, guitar and a cheap computer using only pre-installed sounds and plug-ins). But, collecting together huge quantities of material from times past, now comes the magnum opus “OvalDNA”. And it was worth waiting for – sporting, as it does, a twenty-five track audio CD (rare and unreleased), a DVD containing more than two thousand samples from the original tracks, a video, an interview and ten (!) bonus tracks, plus all the texts in pdf, and a code with which you can freely download an Oval minimal sequencer (called SoundBrowser) with extra loops. It contains material composed and recorded between 1997 and after “O” in 2010, somehow concluding a whole body of work. But it’s a singular way of doing it, opening the sources, and enabling any listener to become an Oval remixer at various level (from the playful to the professional, thanks to the quality of the provided material). Oval’s intact formalism is preserved in the documentation and given as a gift, liberating forever the technology used. Oval’s methodologies are revealed in the timely essay by David Toop, printed in the booklet. His painstakingly attitude toward forging and sequencing sounds has probably generated myths like the one describing him as a director of a perfect sound generating machine orchestra. What Toop reveals in dissecting Oval’s work is the construction of abstract music systems, with all their processual nature and the configuration of these systems with his own unmissable mark.