Oval Säälchen

Pioneer of electronica Oval returns to Berlin for a live show at Säälchen this September.

Oval began in the early 90’s and rapidly gained acclaim for its innovations in electronic music. Composer Markus Popp championed software intuition over his own role in music making for many years, anticipating the AI trend in composition by nearly 30 years. Early albums found a critique of the entire system of recorded music built into every gesture. Popp toured with a desktop computer and projected his screen, constructing remarkably evocative and emotional performances from file manipulation. Each new Oval release saw Popp radically redefine his practice, introducing new elements and embracing new creative challenges, integrating cutting-edge technology and processes into his practice to ensure that each record sounded as contemporary and exhilarating as the last.

New album Scis and its companion EP Eksploio see the producer focus on composition, working with a fresh palette of sounds to create his most emotive work to date. Popp injects a newfound playfulness into his complex loop architectures, with both album and EP exploring and subverting elements of club music. The intricate, organic drum sounds Popp introduced on the Oh! EP and O album have here been replaced with driving electronic rhythms, albeit still approached by Popp as an instrumentalist rather than a beat-maker.

<a href="http://000001.bandcamp.com/album/bez">Bez by Melanie Velarde</a>

Melanie Velarde, keeper of TemporaryArchives and faithful stenographer of the world’s mysterious blur, returns with Bez, her latest reminiscence of sound. Following her 2016 experience Parcel, the third installment in the Commend See series (a multi-disciplinary, site-inspired collaboration series overseen by our NYC storefront and community space), Bez first appeared as a continuous mix of all new and original material from Velarde for RVNG’s Rinse FM takeover in 2018. Long since extracted from the cloud, Bez reappears in freshly sequenced and expanded form for wider wanders. Bez nods to the fragile majesty of Parcel, sifting through emotive sound relics sculpted, performed, lost and found by Velarde, then thread together improvisationally and often inconceivably. Her music conjures a warbled waltz, swaying to the dream time signatures of a buried cinematic score.

Since 2011, Berlin-based musician Nathaniel Fowler has used the NOVO LINE project to take deep dives into the esoteric world of MIDI archeaology; uncovering unused and unknown features in obsolete music production hardware from the wave of Adult Oriented Rock of the late 80s and repurposing its textures and cliches for obtuse listening experiences, continuing his interest in polyrhythms and breathable compositional flow first known to the world via his band Oxes (1998-2011.)