O

However he's making it, Oval's new music is functionally much closer to his older music than to anything else, if a bit more skeletal-- nicely harmonized blips and smears of abstracted noise (with some relationship to plucked-string timbres a lot of the time), rhythms that sometimes splatter freely and sometimes snap to a regular pulse. It's lovely, it's pleasantly unsettling, and there's a hell of a lot of it.

Whilst the floating, weightless atmosphere of much of O shares common qualities with Popp's previous work, the change in approach has appreciable results. The mostly longer tracks on the first disc benefit from the involvement of intricate, expressive drum kit patterns. These seem to be woven carefully into the overall fabric of Popp's at least partially improvised compositions. So important a role do the drums play that Popp often pares the music down to a distinctly minimal dialogue between them and manipulated guitars, as on Cyprus or Glossy.