The two men of Microstoria, Oval’s Markus Popp and Mouse on Mars’ Jan St. Werner, don’t particularly like to refer to their music as “music.” Popp prefers the term “audio,” as might be expected from someone who has scribbled on CDs as part of his creative process, while St. Werner copped in a 2018 interview to being uncomfortable with the mantle of musician. The sounds on their first two albums, 1995’s init ding and 1996’s _snd, initially seem to gel with that stance. They resemble something you might find lying under a rock or lurking beneath the surface of a tidepool: You don’t so much try to comprehend them as admire their contours and movements, marveling at their very existence. Yet there’s a thrilling tension between the Germans’ desire to remove human impulses from their art and their obvious delight in making it.
The two were in their mid-twenties when they made these recordings, and their stars in the electronic underground were rising. init ding came a year after Oval’s pioneering Systemisch, which placed Popp’s arsenal of CD skips and interference blats within the context of chord progressions that sounded almost like pop; the masterpiece 94diskont was just a week away. Meanwhile, Mouse on Mars were moving from the ambient techno of their 1994 debut, Vulvaland, toward something far less categorizable. October 1995 brought Iaora Tahiti, which took sharp-edged electronics and drowned them in the same ’60s space-age cheese that was enthralling artists all over the world, from Jim O’Rourke in Chicago to Stereolab in London to the Shibuya-kei scene in Tokyo. Small wonder O’Rourke and David Grubbs would enlist Popp to work on Gastr Del Sol’s post-rock classic Camoufleur—nor that both O’Rourke and Stereolab would appear on the 1997 Microstoria remix comp Reprovisers, a fantastic summation of this zeitgeist.
For all of Popp’s and Werner’s efforts to stand apart from their work, a spirit of possibility courses through init ding. The duo made much of this music by toggling between synth patches while playing, something anyone who’s ever owned an electronic instrument has done at one point, though rarely with results this spectacular. The underlying drones and chords seem continually to turn over on themselves, refusing to simply hang in the air. Meanwhile, Popp and Werner layer all manner of strange sounds, not least the whoops on opener “16:9” that sound like the carnivorous kin of the chintziest tropical bird effects from the exotica bin. There are sounds with analogues in the real world, like an organ on “Fund” or a creaky old upright on “Dokumint,” but they blend into the music’s overall tenor of alien sponginess. It’s all coated in a patina of noise and static—not the tactile crackles of Burial or the Caretaker but a sort of ferric crust that makes everything sound old and weathered.
