Thursday 15 August 2019, 7.30pm
Cafe OTO and Extra Normal Records present a Contra Pop Festival primer ahead of its return to Ramsgate Beach on the 17th/18th of August, featuring the revelatory future-sound of Markus Popp's Oval and London-based Sino-Greek psychedelic drone combo, Elephant House.
Trailblazing glitch masterpieces (1990s), delicate, hyper-real, futuristic post-rock vignettes (after 2010) and now abstract club bangers with a delicious twist - Markus Popp aka Oval continues to be one of the most prolific, influential forces in contemporary electronic music, a true visionary of digital musics.
Every Oval album is a unique, shape-shifting celebration of innovation, skill and sensibility. In an age of shallow spectacle, M. Popp keeps on reinventing music - merging uncompromising high tech with compelling musicality. He is distinctly doing his own thing, yet always enthusiastically dealing with the “now”. Fact: No one out there plays the computer quite like him.
"Elephant House operate in inflections and implications; like scrapbooks detailing transcendent experiences, these tracks are rich in sensation and ambiguously light in comprehension, pulling together disparate accounts of inner awakening in a bid to identify the common thread between them." – Jack Chuter (ATTN Magazine)
Pony Ride' is the debut release from the London-based Sino-Greek psychedelic drone combo ELEPHANT HOUSE. It features digital drums and vocals from Shenggy Shen and melancholic synthesisers and guitars from Christos Fanaras. The track Shuidiao Getou is a cover of a traditional Chinese folk melody accompanying the Ci poem 'Prelude to the Water Melody' by Su Shi. The other track titles on 'Pony Ride' reference the traditional Mongolian coaxing rituals used to encourage female camels into accepting new-born calves. Coincidentally the duo are named after the cafe in Edinburgh that is the birth place of the Harry Potter series...[more]
