Refresher Course Set 4: Oval, Potter, Reviews

This is the fourth set of the process of my making my way, in chronological order, from the earliest entries on this website, all the way through the 7,500+ that have accumulated since December 1996, when the site launched. That number includes posts from before 1996, those that I later ported from print media and other writing opportunities.

As I finished the third set this weekend, it occurred to me that 10 posts a day may be a burden for the reader, so I may slow the pace a bit — not of the re-archiving, but of these summary posts. I may do one every 30 archived posts, which would mean roughly every three days, rather than a summary post every single day for each set of 10 I’ve cleaned up. We’ll see. Also, rather than lay them out here as bullet points, I may summarize them thematically, at least when doing so applies.

The main item in the set of 10 I looked over today is a 1996 interview with Markus Popp of Oval, both the original published profile, and the full text of the Q&A that informed the profile.

There are a bunch of reviews. In some cases, the albums aren’t online, at least not on official channels. This batch includes the Sci-Fi Cafe compilation (covers of movie and TV theme music by the likes of Loop Guru and Kinder Atom), a Tone Rec album, a Kiyoshi Izumi release on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label, an Asian Dub Foundation/Atari Teenage Riot split, a Toru Takemitsu compilation, a Steve Roach album, a great David Holmes album I still listen to regularly, and Francis Dhomont’s Frankenstein Symphony, which I single out because it is featured in the screenshot of the earliest evidence on the Internet Archive of Disquiet.com:

And finally, there’s mention of a 1997 musical episode of Chicago Hope, which name-checks Dennis Potter. Musical episodes of TV shows have become so common that I’m not sure how many people producing them or participating in them these days are aware of the importance of Potter to the format.