Dok

The first entry in an ongoing collaboration between Oval’s Markus Popp and Tokyo-based artist Christophe Charles, Dok offered a subtle shift forward from the ‘consumer disobedience’ / glitchy-CD-stutter electronica that made Oval’s name. Charles offered Popp access to an archive of field recordings of bells from around the world; Popp transformed this raw material into nine vivid textural explorations that echoed the labyrinthine structures of earlier Oval pieces like “do while,” but had their own, lighter textural palette. There’s something ghostly about Popp’s compositions here, the opening “lens-flared capital” a case in point – across a bed of steely tones, flashes and sparks of abstracted bell-tones collide and capsize. Imagine places of worship, eerily stranded, or city-scapes at night, empty but glittering with lights.