Microstoria is a side project of Oval's Markus Popp and Jan St. Werner of Mouse on Mars. Combining Oval's fetish for CD scarification with MoM's odd instrumentation and breezy, subtlely inchoate arrangements, the pair's combined efforts come off much as one might expect. The group debuted with a pair of albums on the German Mille Plateaux label falling somewhere between the more engaging techno-exotica of St. Werner's main focus and the sometimes gruelling abstraction of Popp's. Both releases were reissued by Stateside post-rock imprint Thrill Jockey (Tortoise, Rome, Trans Am), which also released the remix effort Reprovisers in 1997. Model 3 Step 2 was issued three years later.

Scrive Marchi a proposito della scelta di prender a spunto microstorie per ricostruire la realtà storica in cui esse si muovevano: “…ora la “microstoria” si ...

... una sintesi di musica, poesia, sottile comicità e una riflessione mai banale sulle donne e sulla loro travagliata e appassionante macro e microstoria. ...

... zwanzig Sprachen übersetzt und verband den Namen Ginzburgs, der damals noch in Bologna lehrte, mit dem Konzept der Mikrogeschichte, der «microstoria». ...

L'importanza dello studio consiste anche nella ricchezza e varietà degli episodi di microstoria, il più emblematico dei quali fu il massacro di Gardelegen, ...