Oval
Onko
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Many successful musical innovators have started with minimalism: Anthony Braxton’s massive Creative Orchestra Music couldn’t have happened without For Alto, his single-voice testing ground for his compositional tricks. Hans Reichel’s solo pieces for his “daxophone”–more or less a block of wood played with a bow–aren’t as funny as his version of “The Flight of the Bumble Bee” might be, but they highlight expressive possibilities that standard instruments don’t have, rather than the deficiencies of the daxophone within a traditional context. Even Steve Reich, for whom minimalism has a capital M, started very small, with pieces for two instruments slipping in and out of phase with each other.
Musicians have recently found themselves with a whole new universe of electronic tools at their disposal, and what have they made with them? At one extreme, cookie-cutter dance records; at the other, heartless academic music. The clearest route to the middle is minimalism. The German group Oval (whose sole permanent member seems to be one Markus Popp), for instance, works with a small but virile germ of an idea: the prickly hot sound of damaged and altered CDs. Popp has turned that into a series of very lovely, very strange records, clinging to familiar forms early on (Oval’s first album, never released in the U.S., reportedly has singing on it), but more recently concentrating on microscopic permutations of a single technique.
Nonetheless, Vainio’s ideas seem like they have room to grow. The closest kin to Panasonic’s records, with their hailstorm of high-end clatter, is the early work of Todd Terry, a dance producer who single-mindedly explored his fascination with steady, chipping treble in a series of ultraspare singles, and eventually put it to use in a huge pop hit, Everything but the Girl’s “Missing.” Maybe Vainio’s small violations of silence would get lost in a more elaborate setting, but his obvious respect for the essence of individual sounds suggests that he could present them as details in a larger context without compromising their power.
