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- Some people are on the glitch, they think it's all Oval …
With Oval, Markus Popp reimagined 90s electronic music and pioneered glitch. After a long time in the shadows, the mysterious sound technician is back ...
To become a household name in the field of electronic music, it helps to have a gimmick. Owning a tank, or playing live while wearing a huge mouse's head, is the kind of thing that typically does the trick.
Markus Popp is not a gimmicky sort of guy, which explains why, outside of forums devoted to experimental electronic music, he remains a pretty obscure, marginal figure. But while the world wasn't looking, Popp, a founding and now sole member of long-running Berlin-based outfit Oval, not only ushered in a small revolution in electronic music, but delivered a new term into electronica's critical lexicon – the "glitch".
In the early 90s, mainstream dance music was in thrall to the energetic flail of the breakbeat, the key building block of rave, jungle and drum'n'bass. The music of Oval could not have been more different. Experimental in style, often as concerned by process as results, albums such as 1994's Systemisch and the following year's 94 Diskont – both released on influential Frankfurt label Mille Plateaux – were serene, quasi-ambient drifts of shimmering melody and electronic chatter, sometimes difficult in their stubborn formlessness, but often possessing a warm, enveloping beauty.
If Oval's music sometimes offered little evidence of human fingerprints, this was very much in line with Popp's working methods. He often experimented with the properties of compact discs, defacing and scarring their surfaces with marker pens or sharp objects, and using the subsequent pops, clicks and jumps as raw material. As a programmer, meanwhile, Popp developed software inspired by Brian Eno's concept of "generative music", writing programs that created sounds through complex algorithms, with human input all but eradicated.
All of which sounds a like a long maths lesson. But "glitch" caught on. In Popp's hands, and in those of like-minded artists such as Autechre, glitch developed its own language. Used as percussion, this technique opened up a new palette of rhythmic opportunities; beats suddenly fluttered, kinked, skipped, stuttered. Used as texture, it saw melodies melt like wax, developing alien furrows. Looking back at the electronica of the era, the arrival of glitch seems like a watershed moment. In 1992, Aphex Twin was pumping out acid techno such as Digeridoo. By 1996's Richard D James album, his music was peppered with tics and stutters, rhythms upset with fidgety complexity – and where Aphex went, 10,000 imitators followed. Even Björk took inspiration from Oval, sampling his track Aero Deck on 2001's Vespertine.
All this was probably of little consequence to Popp himself, who has remained largely silent over the past decade, his last release being So, a 2003 collaboration with singer Eriko Toyoda. He breaks a lengthy silence with a new album, simply titled O, due on Thrill Jockey in September. A double LP – the first containing full-length tracks, the second comprising 50 one-minute "ringtones" – it marks a radical departure for Popp, finding him working on a computer with, for once, stock sounds and plug-ins and, surprisingly, live drums. Perhaps even more than his 90s fare, though, it's delicate and precise, supremely detailed and guided by beautiful, yearning melodies that evolve in slow motion. It is, explains Popp, a break from everything that's gone before, unveiling "the musician that was hiding behind the technician" – and as quiet surprises go, it's up there with 2010's best.
Download the Ringtone EP
Download the bonus track School Trail
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Переслать - What makes the perfect festival breakfast band?
This weekend it's Latitude, one of the sleepiest festivals in the UK. So how best to deliver a thrilling early-morning shock to wake up the punters who've just crawled out of their tents?
It's 11am, and you've woken up in a heavily branded field somewhere in the UK. You've just crawled out of a tent that's hotter than a nuclear reactor, feeling like a slug is giving birth to you. A dawn drum circle seems to have formed behind your forehead, you haven't slept since however long ago Wednesday was, and you're starting to regret your first mouthful of Patagonian hamster crepe. What sort of music could you possibly enjoy in that state?
The art of the breakfast band is an underrated one. I'm thinking of those selfless acts that cross oceans to play their defining summer moment to five swaying all-nighters in a Berkshire mudpool at 10.30am. Most festivals just bung on a minor major-label act and let them strut their homogenous indie-rock stuff, oblivious to the fact that the last thing the punters are interested in first thing on a festival morning is mundanity. No, best breakfast bands play to the extremes: you want to be soothed or shocked, surprised or sympathised. The last thing you want is AN Other bunch of Joy Division wannabes called the Bogstandard Guitaryblokes trying to turn your hangover into their big break for the mainstream.
I learned this a few years ago after sitting on the judging panel for Road to V, a TV show that followed two unsigned bands vying for the honour of opening V2008. After hours of heated discussion we chose a Libertines-style band called the Rebs and a folktronic sound-sculptor called Matt Trakker. Both impressive live turns, but in the event, none of the crowd even lifted their straw hats off their faces to look at them. Turns out we should've put on the maniacal nine-piece agit-funk-bhangra-hop-pop collective after all.
So what makes the perfect breakfast band? Familiarity helps; my first ever Glastonbury opened with a set from Kirsty MacColl, whose Kite album I'd adored as a teenager. I've returned every year in the hope of recapturing that profound mixture of homecoming and hangover relief. It's the mentality that's seen everyone from Björn Again to Status Quo play early festival sets, while the Glastonbury Town Band have opened the Pyramid stage since time immemorial (although the band now hails from Yeovil, presumably having become too big after such unrelenting annual exposure); brass-band versions of popular rock hits simply seem the least offensive soundtrack to your fourth liquid breakfast of the weekend.
At the other end of the scale, all-out offensiveness can be just as effective, as the Dillinger Escape Plan discovered when their opening Sunday slot at Reading festival in 2002 went down in legend after singer Greg Puciato defecated into a plastic bag, lobbed it into the crowd and then smeared it on himself when the crowd understandably lobbed it straight back. Not a trick, admittedly, that Kirsty employed.
The other most inspired wake-up calls reward those who brave the midday sun with an event to make those who missed it forever regret that 4am binge. Few (who were there) will forget crawling out of their tents at Glasto 2004 to find the English National Opera performing a section of Wagner's Ring Cycle in full modern warfare dress on the Pyramid stage.
Speaking of which, how did this year's Glastonbury breakfast bands measure up? Rolf Harris played the student-friendly novelty card to his advantage, complete with a hip-hop sidekick and glamorous didgeridoo roadie. Tinchy Stryder wasn't an "event" exciting enough to drag this wreck of a hack out of his tent/oven before noon, and Frightened Rabbit did a noble job of soothing away the Sunday sunstroke. But two really stood out – the Joy Formidable opened with bells, whistles, sirens and alarms, and pulled no musical punches in consideration of the hour, but their dark/light firebrand shoe-pop was like a hypo-shot of caffeine direct to the ears.
And Holland's De Staat almost made us drop our bacon baps, forcing us to prise open our gummy eyelids and concentrate as they skipped through genres ranging from Queen-gone-blues to summery pop to jazzy rock to doomy funk-metal numbers about going to hell to have a fight with Satan. They exemplified the traits of the perfect breakfast band: that it doesn't really matter what sort of music you play as long as you're consistently tuneful, admirably adventurous and above all interesting.
So what do you think makes the best sort of festival opener? Which sets have made you choke on your recovery catburger or proved the perfect accompaniment to your first cider of the day?
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - The essential Lovebox playlist
From Roxy Music to Wild Beasts, get ready for Lovebox festival with our special We7 playlist
This year's Lovebox festival in east London will play host to Hot Chip, These New Puritans, Grandmaster Flash, and the Hackney Colliery Band, with headline performances from Dizzee Rascal, Roxy Music and Grace Jones. To get you in the mood, or offer some musical solace if you're not going, We7 and Lovebox have created a gargantuan playlist featuring bands appearing at this year's event.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Will Furniture finally enjoy the comfort of success?
British new wave band Furniture were never afforded the recognition they deserved. But the digital release of their album The Wrong People may change all that
This week one of the best albums ever recorded becomes available to download. Just don't expect to find it on iTunes. Even Amazon (at the time of writing) is flogging only one copy at £20.
Furniture's 1986 cult classic, The Wrong People, fused new wave, jazz, blues, post-punk, alt-rock, and about a dozen other genres with some of the most poetic lyrics ever written. Yet for all its literary qualities – its evocation of the mundane, compromise, opportunity and transience of real life – The Wrong People is a theatre of the visceral, a melodrama and gorgeous sax-soaked 1980s pop all at once. "When all that lies ahead's another dismal day, speak out, speak out loud until your lungs give way," intones vocalist Jim Irvin on the album's breezy Roxy-esque opener, Shake Like Judy Says.
Furniture formed in 1979 but it wasn't until 1986 that they supped from the thimble of success. Signed to Stiff Records, the era-defining Brilliant Mind reached No 21 that year, kicking off with the unlikely line: "I'm at the stage / Where everything I thought meant something / Seems so unappealing." (On their posthumous Best Of collection, the band claim that Irvin wrote this on the top of a bus on his way back from the dole office: "We needed a hit and decided that this was it.")
Their good fortune, however, was short-lived. After 30,000 copies of The Wrong People were pressed, Stiff Records went into liquidation and was sold to ZTT. Furniture signed to Arista and released one more album in 1989, Food, Sex & Paranoia (hunt high and low for the extended remix of One Step Behind You), before disbanding (or rather, petering out) in 1990. Since then, various members have formed Transglobal Underground, contributed to Melody Maker under pseudonyms, and even penned the (dire) Michael Gray house hit, The Weekend.
But back to the record in hand. How, when everything else was against them, did Furniture scale such lofty creative heights? The answer may lie in the band's ponderous, six-minute masterpiece, She Gets Out the Scrapbook. The soundtrack to my own teenage years (and many a night since), it's a four-part opus, opening with a man searching for his lover, his intensity rising: "Even when you're making love to him my shadow's on the wall." By the time first person has switched to second and then finally to third, a kind of ennui creeps in: "She gets out the scrapbook and they say / Did we really live like this?" But ennui explodes into passion as one chorus bleeds into another, until the song's climax: "Come on you big bad world and entertain me." The fade-out has Irvin crying: "I can't live like this."
Existential stuff. And according to the band, the song became "a cause celebre, a milestone, a liability, a highlight and a low point at one time or another". They claimed in interviews that the recorded version was one of their greatest frustrations, its glaring flaws only highlighting "what might have been".
What might have been. Never has an album title been such a fitting epitaph. On these 11 tracks, the band play as if their sadness depends upon it. But somehow they transcend miserablism; they inspire. Because, like Gatsby (and I don't use the comparison lightly), Furniture believe in the green light, "the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us". Am I alone here?guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
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