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ARTIST
TITLE
Romantiq
FORMAT
LP

LABEL
CATALOG #
THRILL 590LP THRILL 590LP
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
8/29/2025

Originally released in 2023. "The music of Markus Popp is endlessly curious. Since the early '90s his pioneering albums as Oval have continually excavated new spaces in electronic music, leaving an indelible mark on the landscape. Popp's playful and singular approach to sound has continually left critics and peers alike confounded by his ability to conjure such lithe, evocative sonics from software. Celebrated collaborations with Jan St. Werner as Microstoria remain foundational texts in underground music, while a rare split record with Liturgy exemplifies Popp's reach and influence outside electronic spheres. His album Romantiq turns the producer's inquisitive ear to an omnipresent and yet oft ill-defined, even maligned area of music and art -- the romantic. The album 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. 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. Swelling atmospheres emerge like perfume, rich scents flooding the senses before evaporating on the breeze. Disparate traditional elements and romantic tropes are juxtaposed and recast into a future-seeking survey of ephemeral emotion. Throughout Romantiq, Popp masterfully blurs the line between the organic and digital, obscuring or revealing instruments in service of atmosphere."