For Record Store Day 2011 Thrill Jockey offers up a split LP release featuring two of the label’s musical extremities, recent signing Liturgy, and electronic pioneer Oval. Not a random pairing, but in fact born out of each band’s mutual appreciation of the other. The artists are both given a side of an LP to share exclusive new recordings.

Oval is electronic pioneer Markus Popp. Popp is often credited as the creator of what was later dubbed the “glitch” or “clicks & cuts” style. Popp’s mid-’90s albums Systemisch (Thrill-032) and 94Diskont (Thrill-036) took the world of electronic music and turned it on its head. He went on to create sound sculptures that were exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. Last year Popp returned with his first new material in nearly a decade - the Oh 12”EP and the massive double album O. Popp put forth the musician that was hiding behind the technician and the result was a celebration in delicacy and detail: handcrafted polyrhythmic phrases, riffs and structures, bristling with tiny resonances. For this special Record Store Day release Oval gives us four new songs to follow up his heavy 2010 output.

Liturgy is the Brooklyn based band of Hunter Hunt Hendrix, Greg Fox, Tyler Dusenbury, and Bernard Gann. The band released the critically acclaimed album Renihilation on 20 Buck Spin in 2009 and will follow it with the release of Aesthethica on Thrill Jockey this May. The band disregards the genre boundaries of black metal, hardcore and experimental music. For this Record Store Day release Liturgy took the opportunity to explore writing music together as a band for the first time. They wanted to weave together different doom metal and black metal riffs with loosely related chanting and electronics. The result is a single soundscape with shifting tempos and textures - composition duties are shared, details are not overthought, improvisation is employed. All in all a different side of Liturgy.