Wednesday 19 February 2025, 7.30pm
Markus Popp, the visionary artist behind Oval, is set to revisit his seminal 1995 album "94diskont." in a groundbreaking live performance.
"94diskont." is widely considered a landmark achievement in electronic music. Popp's bold experimentation with glitches and fragmented samples created a wholly new aesthetic, forever altering the landscape of ambient music. The album's unique blend of the avant-garde and the deeply listenable resulted in a hypnotic and downright otherworldly experience, leaving a lasting impact on generations of artists and listeners.
This new live performance is not a mere rehash, but a meticulously crafted reimagining. Popp delves deep into the original source material, drawing from the original 1.44 MB floppy disc archives (and Rolodex cards) to create a fresh interpretation that, once again, will push boundaries.
Far from a simple reconstruction, this new version benefits from the vast sonic palette Popp has amassed over the years since the album's release. He'll be utilizing the full arsenal of tools and techniques honed across his acclaimed body of work to breathe new life into "94diskont."
And this isn't just a sonic experience. Accompanying the performance will be stunning visuals by award-winning, cutting-edge digital video artist Robert Seidel. Together, Popp and Seidel will deliver a synesthetic spectacle that merges sound and vision, appealing not only to fans of electronic and ambient music but also to connoisseurs of avant-garde multimedia art.
Trailblazing glitch masterpieces (1990s), delicate, hyper-real, futuristic post-rock vignettes (after 2010) and now abstract club bangers with a delicious twist - Markus Popp aka Oval continues to be one of THE most prolific, influential creative forces in contemporary electronic music.
Every Oval album is a unique, shape-shifting celebration of innovation, skill and sensibility. In an age of shallow spectacle, Popp keeps going on his deep dives, always ready to reinvent and surprise - merging uncompromising high tech with compelling musicality. Popp is distinctly doing his thing, yet always enthusiastically dealing with the “here & now”. No one out there plays the computer quite like him.
Kirk Barley is a Yorkshire composer and sound artist, currently based in London.
His highly textural music is formed from studio and field recordings, digital synthesis, and musique concrète audio processing techniques. Drawing influence from minimalist music, techno and hip-hop, he experiments with unusual time signatures, just intonation tunings and algorithmic composition, to create a unique and compelling soundworld.
Kirk has performed across the UK, Europe and Canada, and has completed commissioned work for the Open Music Archive and British Art Show.
Landscapes is the latest release from prolific Yorkshire born composer and producer Kirk Barley. Across a tight 34-minute runtime, the album presents eleven short pieces that inhabit an exotic, other-worldly space of chiming guitars, buzzing insects and squelching synth tones.
Working with looped fragments of his own instrumental, electronic and field-recorded sounds, Barley assembled the tracks from edited improvisations, some of them enriched with live drums from Matt Davies. Barley's skittering, off-kilter loops overlap freely, combining with meterless, free-jazz-inspired drumming and processed environmental field recordings to craft gently surging sonic environments. At once static and constantly shifting, the pieces unfold themselves like views of a landscape, where we take in individual details one at a time while always remaining aware of the whole.
Kirk's new album 'Lux' will be released on March 14th via Odda.
