Pioneering producer Markus Popp has announced his new Oval album Romantiq, out May 12th. The new album finds Popp turning his inquisitive ear and singular imagination to an omnipresent and yet oft ill-defined, even maligned area of music and art – the romantic. Romantiq foregrounds the emotional drive that has always been present in Oval records, providing a genuine and unabashed interrogation of its subject matter delivered with delectable sophistication. Alongside the album announcement Popp has shared first single “Touha”, a track that captures Romantiq’s depth of feeling in radiant crystal. Iridescent piano figures ripple like light on moving water, while swelling electronic atmospheres emerge as anaesthetising perfume before evaporating on the breeze.
Romantiq evolved from an audio-visual collaboration with digital artist Robert Seidel for the grand opening of the German Romantic Museum in Frankfurt – a huge outdoor projection covering the museum building. From the project’s inception both Seidel and Popp sought a more expansive definition of “romantic”, extending outward from the museum’s comprehensive survey of the 19th-century epoch in art. Popp crafted dozens of short vignettes that each sought to evoke a specific mood or emotion in dialogue with Seidel’s dense, intricate digital imagery and animations. From those initial foundations Popp continued to develop his initial sketches into something even more ambitious and diverse in its outlook. Romantiq surveys a staggering amount of source material, looking as much to literature, architecture and artistic traditions as it does music. Processed period instruments trace luxuriant spaces that shift from low-lit chambers to glistening palatial grandeur, glitching through past, present and future. Disparate traditional elements and romantic tropes are juxtaposed and recast into a future-seeking survey of ephemeral emotion.
Through exploring the shifting notion of “romance” across time and space, Popp sculpts spaces that feel both familiar and uncanny, nostalgic and futuristic. Much like the transient emotions it surveys, Romantiq’s evocative sonics conjure flickering images that glitch, evolve and collapse in on one another – opulent neo-chamber music lit by the paradoxically heartwarming screen glow of social media flirtations. Romantiq’s omnivorous approach to its core theme and source material provides a wry and expansive definition of romance, capturing in surprising detail the essence of this intangible, yet universal human emotion.
Pre-order Oval’s Romantiq:
https://thrilljockey.com/
