Oval with Christophe Charles

Dok

Oval is one Markus Popp, a German-born artist. Dok, a collaboration with Japanese musician Christophe Charles, is the band's fourth album. Oval's artistic medium is the compact disc itself--Popp evidently takes CDs, scratches them, samples the resultant skipping and manipulates the recordings into musical works. With Dok, Oval samples the results of a project by Charles in which he recorded bells from around the world. Popp subscribes to the social theories of the late Gilles Deleuze and Feliz Guattari and makes his art according to their ideas of rhizomes and machines. His constructions are rhizomatic: they are perpetually in the middle, ready to be reworked, almost self-consciously transient. CDs may be scratched and rebuilt ad infinitum. Popp's work is suspiciously reminiscent of the sculptor in Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night, A Traveler who builds sculptures out of books, then builds new sculptures out of the books written about his sculpture.

It is questionable, though, whether Dok be appreciated without some knowledge of the philosophy that went into making it. It's certainly more listenable than Oval's previous albums, which have been physically painful to the ears. The distinctive clicking of the skipping CDs provides a percussive element, and various other layers of sound are layered above this to create reasonably cohesive compositions. The end result, though, isn't terribly exciting on first listen. Repeated listenings (Dok must be actively listened to) yield more; Popp's subtlety emerges. If you're willing to put the time into it, Dok is an interesting record; it's not, however, one for dilentantes.