So, like, anyway, maybe Markus Popp has been listening to Tujiko
Noriko, too, or maybe he hasn't. It really doesn't really matter,
really; this — his — Noriko-esque turn into
emotional electronic music, replete with adorning singing and
everything, comes as quite an unexpected and unimaginably beautiful
turn; his crawling caterpillar — his life as Oval, all-time
asshole of amusical this-is-derived-from-programming-not-emotion
boffinism — now winged as some beautiful
digi-fucking/popsong-fluttering butterfly, such a turn turning out
metamorphosistic dreamwork music as graceful as the girlish vocals of
Eriko Toyoda, which turn treat'd pirouettes affected amongst all that
fried circuitry. That Markus's name's been Popp has, thus far, seem'd
somewhat an irony, even though the tuneful wonder of his wrangled
digital-detritus was melodious enough to sell a whole generation's
worth of laptop boys on the industry of "glitch." By the time he'd
tried so hard to distance himself from the regular modes of making
music — y'know, the ones that were all over that dorky first
Oval record, with the band and the basslines and the dude crooning
— by tossing "generative" into any reporter's eyes, the sting
and the salt had made Popp less a savior than just some soldier,
dogged and doggerel and dogmatic and pragmatic in his approach to
software and produced-sound and such. I don't know what changed to
make him want to infuse his music with sentimentalism whilst keeping
it essentially stylistically similar. Maybe he fell in love? Or, hey,
maybe he really did hear one of those Tujiko Noriko records, which
are wonderful and beautiful and mysterious and cute and savage all at
once. And, so, as So, Popp and Toyoda create great symphonies from so
much strewn digitalia, incessant buzzes staggering as flickering
rhythms, massive arcs of symphonic tonalism howling like choirs of
angelic white-noise, the inconstant fluorescence tinging the
fluttering photographic light an off-color cast of deep buttery
lemony green, underground and foreign and exotic and romantic as
Toyoda runs away from Popp's quixotic gaze like Shu Qi fled HHH's
camera at the start of "Millennium Mambo," her run kept to a rhythm
of overhead lights that cause your eyes to lose their sharpness. It's
just so fucking pretty, is all; and it's felt in your stomach, a
tense knot that's almost always feeling like it's slipping. So, yeah,
like, So is so good.
|
