WHEN : 7th November, 7:00pm
WHERE : Institute of Modern Art
In the 1990s, the German band Oval changed electronic music. They pioneered glitch, processing the sound of skipping, damaged CDs to create lilting rhythmic soundscapes. Original member, Markus Popp, continues to release albums under the name. Leaving glitch behind, his recent albums have been created entirely on an Apple Powerbook using specially commissioned software—Ovalprocess. Popp wants us to understand contemporary music in terms of the software processes used to generate it, as though the software designers were the true composers.
He explains: ‘I was never interested in synthesisers. I never know what to say when people ask me about Kraftwerk. The keyboard era of sound production was over ten years ago. Since then, we can talk about music productivity being completely located in software—it’s the Powerbook era. It would be possible to go back to another era and work with MIDI equipment, but I’m not interested in that. It’s too time-consuming and the interface technology is too bad.’
