OKLOU - Choke Enough

That Marylou Mayniel had a pronounced talent for sound design was already well established. Riding on a cult following built up over the years, "Galore" showcased all the creativity the musician and composer from Poitiers brings to the handling and manipulation of sound, delivering a mixtape of nocturnal, elusive allure, as potent in conjuring hidden suggestions as it was skilled at giving them a more compact structure, closer to the pull of r&b and pop communication more broadly. Having a solid classical background behind her, along with a wealth of references ranging from Dälek to James Blake (and, why not, the natural world around her), certainly helps broaden horizons and redefine the possibilities of sound and context. Nowhere is this more evident than on "Choke Enough", a debut album that finds Oklou travelling along constantly intersecting tracks, where the hi-tech electronics of the early 2000s meet the discipline of baroque composition. The result is a clash-and-encounter between centuries and universes, with the oversized sweep of the most enchanting adventure, yet also an inexorably intimate streak, the kind that belongs to someone who leaves the party at its peak because their social batteries ran out long ago.

Clubbing, after all, is and can be a mental matter before anything else. Mayniel does everything she can to remind us of this, starting with the way she modulates her voice, never worked up, never more than a murmur, caught at times intoning a small melody, at others closer to the catatonia of compulsive doomscrolling.

That doesn't make the record any less engaging: Oklou populates the spaces of her personal discotheque with finely tuned work on the beats, on the evocative character of the sound, able to roam freely across time without ever feeling disjointed or anachronistic. Behind the sonic haze of "Endless", amid rare moments of rhythmic rarefaction, one can make out a universe of strong internal tensions, where every track constantly shifts shape, often without settling into a definitive form.

The synthetic flutes that open the main motif of "Thank You For Recording" pirouette gracefully around a central axis that gradually grows firmer, buoyed by glitchy cutaways and assorted digital dust, all while keeping their lightness intact. And so "Obvious", despite seeming to head toward the more expansive shapes of r&b, takes less than a minute to morph into a Renaissance cantata, a masked ball to be celebrated strictly on headphones.

At times the experience turns rollicking, bordering on videogame territory (the underwater trumpets that define "ICT", fished out from who knows which secret level of "Sonic"); other times the design tends to redefine the classic PC Music sound through vibrant, insistent melodic hooks ("Take Me By The Hand", which takes on the bubblegum lesson of Hannah Diamond and renders it even more crystalline).

Oklou controls and manages every choice without ever setting herself limits, blending each track into a whole that flows as composite yet organic, making plausible the coexistence of trance anthems like the exceptional "Harvest Sky", a vivid memory of youth and the euphoric peak of the collection, alongside refined folktronic closers ("Blade Bird", like an Eartheater suspended in thin air). Impossibly soft yet capable of explosive left hooks, the French artist absorbs all the electronic trends of recent years to give back a diachronic image of them, in a surreal (and precisely for that, electrifying!) dialogue between centuries and contexts. Feeling sufficiently overwhelmed?

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24/02/2025