Marylou Mayniel could be a traditionalist at coronary heart. “I’ve gotten bored with the web,” she not too long ago informed Crack—hanging information for the singer and producer whose first launch as Oklou, 2020’s Galore, made her title (pronounced “OK, Lou”) amongst a sure sect of the terminally on-line. A classically educated French musician turned London membership child, Mayniel makes digital pop with the rigor and meticulousness of a Bach cantata. Her debut album, choke sufficient, is a foggy, twilit fusion of Y2K worship and medieval melodicism, with A.G. Prepare dinner and Danny L Harle becoming a member of longtime co-producer Casey MQ behind the boards. Without delay jacked into the mainframe and misplaced within the wilderness, the document casts Oklou as a cipher in her personal music; at the same time as we hear her, we by no means actually know her.
As a founding member of NUXXE, the label and collective that has come to outline a sure “artwork schoolers go to Berghain” sound, Mayniel stood out amongst her contemporaries for her relative reserve: neither as sensual as Eartheater nor as bawdy as Shygirl. Galore songs like “fall” and “god’s chariots” have been puckish and delicate, constructed on little greater than acid-synth arpeggios and the occasional drum loop. Final yr, although, I noticed Oklou carry out in a seventh-story walkup on the Decrease East Facet. Watching Mayniel’s arms dance nimbly throughout the keyboard, assembling loops in actual time, every instrument—even the guitar she sheepishly picked as much as play the then-unreleased single “Blade Fowl”—felt like an extension of her individual. This, it appeared, have to be the world’s most charming cyborg.
On choke sufficient, that extremely expert performer comes into her personal as an artist. The title observe is definitely Oklou’s greatest so far, channeling the muffled atmosphere of a “you’re within the lavatory at a celebration” video by 4 minutes of metamorphic trance. Within the absence of a four-on-the-floor rhythm, its shifting synth timbres create the impact of a sculpture considered from totally different angles, a high quality of regularly changing into—but by no means fairly reaching—shared throughout a lot of the songs right here. Album opener “Limitless” unfurls from a distant hemiola to a misty ballad to a charmingly hesitant keyboard solo: a lone oboe preset that wanders into the combination earlier than virtually self-consciously ceding the highlight again to Mayniel.
Uncanny textures abound. On “Thank You for Recording,” Oklou and her synth flute commerce melodies like a cyberpunk Disney princess duetting with the robotic chook perched on her finger. The association harkens again to Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, a symphony for youngsters wherein every instrument stands in for a distinct character. Mayniel’s conservatory background crops up all through choke sufficient, particularly in her fondness for imitative polyphony, a trademark of Baroque composition the place melodic traces are shared between a number of devices. The sugar rush of “Ict” boasts a trumpet chorus that plausibly may’ve been written through the 1600s, and the digi-clarinet and tambourine of “Apparent” are straight out of a Renaissance honest. In Oklou’s arms, hyper-quantized digital beats make pure counterparts to the equally exact music composed centuries earlier.