Oklou: Love Sensation
After growing bored with our extremely online existence, on her breakthrough debut album, Choke Enough, Oklou is going offline to explore the dopamine-releasing rush of IRL experience and emotional intensity
“I’m actually a bit sad to acknowledge this, because it’s been my inspiration since I was able to go online on my own, but I’ve gotten tired of the internet,” says Marylou Mayniel, as she absent-mindedly sucks from a magenta smoothie through a paper straw. “My YouTube algorithm has become so bad now that I don’t discover anything any more. It’s not just YouTube – the daily energy I get from X is terrible. Instagram is the same. I’m bored.”
Just behind her, hovering above the messy ponytail scraping together her dark hair, is the kind of bland art that adorns the magnolia walls of Airbnbs across every major tourist city. Physically, she’s in NYC, readying herself for a day of US promo around her eerie and emotive debut album Choke Enough. Spiritually, she could be anywhere, suspended in the digital ether, with the shadow of a camera-off PR executive orbiting our discussion. In a world where tech oligarchs have seized the means of communication, destabilising social media’s promise of connection with turbocharged algorithms churning out low-grade content, it’s no surprise Mayniel is ready for something different. After all, a dominant force within her music is a kind of soft hedonism – an impulse to seek out new sounds and sensations, driven by a desire to get closer to the ephemeral, ecstatic nature of being alive.
Top: JOHANNA PARV, Mouthpiece: LOKIDOLOR
Across more than a decade, the vocalist and producer, known to a generation of hyperpop heads as Oklou, has sculpted a left-field pop sound that speaks to digital alienation and the resulting, aching search for connection that defines our times. With an ear for sticky turns of phrase, her lyrics – exploring identity, heartbreak and fragmented memories – feel confessional, yet land with the kind of self-aware performance of Instagram poetry, delivered in a girlish, pitch-shifted voice buried in reverb. Heavily influenced by the spacious beats of alternative 2010s R&B and the futurist sound design of Japan’s ambient greats, these elements have led Mayniel’s work – generally resistant to catch-all labels – to be described as heavenly or lullaby-like: a dewrinkling of the inherent weirdness that lurks within these songs. This undersells Oklou’s uncanny sound, which luxuriates in the liminal and technologically corrupted – like a Y2K ringtone echoing through an empty waiting room.
There’s a sense of placelessness in Mayniel’s music, a quality particularly pronounced on Choke Enough, where the artist’s quest to find the perfect loop has manifested as songs which seem to occupy their own space or continuum. Growing up in the relatively anonymous central-west French region of Poitou-Charentes, music was a way for her to leave behind the tedium of time and place, and access deeper emotional truths. As a child in an area where, by her own admission, “nothing crazy was happening”, she immersed herself in mind-opening musical training in cello, piano and musical theory before undergoing more rigid musical training at a conservatoire. “It showed me what I didn’t want to do, which is useful,” she says now. However, performing in orchestras has had a lasting impact on the musician, who describes her teenage experiences in the cello section as possessing a spiritual ecstasy normally reserved for religious rites. “The physical experience of being sonically immersed is really memorable. Sometimes, I would stop playing just to focus on the sounds surrounding me,” recalls Mayniel. “There were moments when I would find myself actually crying, due to the power of sound when you’re within an orchestra. I miss it a lot.”
“There were moments where I would find myself actually crying, due to the power of sound when you’re within an orchestra. I miss it a lot”
In this moment, as in others, I’m struck by Mayniel’s flair for casually delivering moments of profundity. Perhaps it’s a natural byproduct of conversing in her second language, English, but when speaking with Mayniel, you can never be quite sure where her mind will go next. Often, whether she’s discussing the technical aspects of her music or reflecting on her biography, she takes a beat or two to consider her next answer, her eyes drifting upwards to the right-hand corner of my laptop screen. Mentally sifting past easily proffered clichés, she carefully mulls over her words, struggling to make her intensely felt inner world intelligible. When words fail, the artist’s hands come into view, the silver rings on her fingers glinting in the light as she gestures at a significance just beyond the surface of the sentences she’s uttering.
When playing in orchestras, she was able to find herself within sound – not just encountering music from the outside, but playing an active part within it. It’s a sensation that others encounter on the dancefloor, whether from a wobbling bass rippling through the room, or the sense of togetherness partygoers feel as they move in tandem with the beat. It seems almost logical, then, that club culture would appeal to the artist, who traces her raver origin story back to her childhood. “I’m going to be really honest. I wasn’t necessarily a pretty child – I didn’t suffer from it, but I was very much aware of it,” she says. “But I thought I was a good dancer, so dancefloors represented a way for me to show my qualities and my sensuality. It was my chance to shine, and that feeling never left me.”
Top: MARRKNULL, Trousers: INNER LIGHT, Necklace: ANGE PARADIZ
Nowadays, Mayniel rarely has the energy to stay out, favouring an early night to a warehouse party, but her emergence as an artist is intimately tied to the club. Moving to the French capital for the first time in her early twenties, she dived into the city’s party scene. Soaking up the sweat of Parisian nightlife, Mayniel proved herself to be a determined autodidact by day – becoming a student of rave culture’s history and social significance, one online video at a time. “I would spend hours watching documentaries, digging through the deepest corners of YouTube, making infinite playlists of house and techno,” she recalls. Blurring the lines between IRL and URL worlds, Mayniel believes in a borderless musical landscape but does note some practical distinctions of living in the French city – namely, “In Paris, you can party until 7am.”
Rave music provided an important creative outlet and entry into the music industry. Not only did she teach herself to DJ, but she also co-founded These Girls Are on Fiyah, a now-disbanded group of all-female selectors. Later, during a pre-pandemic stint living in London, she would work with club-centric producers, including Night Slugs founder Bok Bok, PC Music’s stable of pop experimentalists and the deconstructed club label NUXXE, which would go on to launch the careers of Sega Bodega, Shygirl and Coucou Chloe. Her collaborators have been many, but the most vital and enduring among them is Canadian artist Casey Manierka-Quaile, known as Casey MQ. Meeting at the Paris edition of the Red Bull Music Academy in 2015, the duo began a long-running musical partnership and friendship that has spanned the past decade. Their fertile creative relationship has found form in the experimental textures of the 2017 collaborative EP For the Beasts, as well as the apocalyptic visions of Oklou’s 2020 Galore mixtape and the cyber sigilisms of Choke Enough, with Manierka-Quaile racking up co-production and writing credits on both projects.
Lace top pieces: ALDWIN TEVA WILLIAM, Trousers and shirt: PROTOTYPES
When asked about their relationship, Mayniel is effusive. “It was an actual blessing that we… I was going to say that we found each other, but really, he is helping me more than I help him with music – way more,” she says. “He legit really helped me achieve my visions, and apart from him being an excellent musician and songwriter, we are also friends, which makes a huge difference in the music and the experience I have in working with somebody.” Having such a constant collaborator has been key in helping Mayniel hone her own artistry. “I can be very shy and impressionable when it comes to working with other musicians,” she adds. “As much as I think I am becoming more confident in my vision, I don’t always have the energy to be adamant with what my sound should be when working with other musicians. I found my perfect partner with Casey.”
Other trusted collaborators include the lead architects of hyperpop, A. G. Cook and Danny L Harle, who have worked with Mayniel over the years and also crop up as producers on Choke Enough. Add to this the fact that Mayniel has toured with Caroline Polachek and remixed Door for the Pang remix album, and it’s easy to see why Mayniel is often identified as a figure within the hyperpop funhouse. As a result, Mayniel’s work is touched by the hyperpop halo effect: her releases are passionately dissected by Reddit communities, with each post flooded with comments. To a relatively small but hypervocal fandom – who rabidly consume her releases and compulsively dig through a back catalogue of digital ephemera, including SoundCloud edits, experimental YouTube videos and stream-of-consciousness social media posts – she’s the avatar of the very online, magical dream girl. Mayniel is ambivalent about the hyperpop label, noting that it lives on as more of a vibe than a functional descriptor, as the movement’s pop-maximalist producers have redefined the mainstream in their image. “Some people class Caroline Polachek as hyperpop, but if you listen to So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings, it sounds like classic pop music – nothing like SOPHIE. The association is mainly because she’s been working with Danny L Harle,” she explains. “I could say the same for many artists, maybe me included.”
“My parents are big fans of folklore and traditional dance and music. Now I recognise my attachment to and love of this music, and also how similar it is to forms of more modern music – it shares a lot in common with rave”
Choke Enough – recorded in her Paris studio and, later, LA, once she’d wrapped the tour run for Galore – ricochets from the trancey pendulum of the Underscores-featuring Harvest Sky to the vulnerable, romantic mutterings and stripped-back guitar of closer Blade Bird, via the ghostly trill of Take Me by the Hand, buoyed by Drain Gang rapper Bladee. Interestingly, a scan of the lyrics shows folklore and mythology to be a recurring theme, whether it’s “holy inspiration comes/ through the nerves in this suspension” (Take Me by the Hand), or a call to arms for a “queen of the scarecrow” (Harvest Sky). For Mayniel, the project is imbued with memories of folkloric traditions, traditional music and the bal-musette dances she grew up attending in regional France. “My parents are big fans of folklore and traditional dance and music. I would go every weekend to traditional bals and listen to the same type of music, which I became very sick of when I was a teenager,” she says. “Now I recognise my attachment to and love of this music, and also how freaking similar it is to forms of more modern music. There are the same cycles and loops repeating over one another – it shares a lot in common with rave music.”
Looking back, she can contextualise those bals as providing an opportunity for communal transcendence – the same feelings she has sought throughout her life, whether playing in orchestras or in the club. “With traditional music, it’s an accordion, a violin and guitar playing on stage. But the musicians playing are observing the crowd, adapting their play to be slower or faster – just like a DJ would,” she says. “It’s a chance for people to come together and sweat. I have profound memories that I really cherish of hearing people scream while dancing, as if they are in some sort of trance,” she explains. By melding ancient traditions, communities old and new, and an awareness of the diminishing distinction between fantasy and reality, Mayniel has created a rich emotional space to play in.
Sweater: INNER LIGHT, Sweatpants: 8IGB, Necklace: COLOMBE D’HUMIERES, Shoes: CONVERSE
Harvest Sky, in particular, was inspired by her own impressionistic recollections of a recurring event from her childhood: the festivities surrounding La Fête de la Saint-Jean, where large bonfires are lit to celebrate the birth of John the Baptist in a Catholic reclamation of pagan rituals. “As a child, it’s a great moment. You run everywhere, the fire is burning, and people are dancing around,” she says. “I’m very attached to these memories because it was very joyful at the time, but there’s also the capacity for these moments to be weird as fuck. There’s adults not being super careful or very sober – there are some dark moments as well.” This tension isn’t directly addressed in Mayniel’s work, but there is a curious sonic sense of distance and detachment – replicated elsewhere in her work through a capacious production style – which she puts down to the remove with which she observed partygoers as a child. “One of my favourite things is hearing the sounds of people partying from afar. Sensations I really liked as a child were hearing the world have fun somewhere. You’re not there, but you can hear it – it’s a way to be there, a different connection that touches me.”
The visuals for Choke Enough play with this idea of presence in absentia. Conscious of the online filter through which we see Mayniel, the videos and campaign imagery don’t pretend to bring us any closer to the artist herself. Instead, they emphasise the distance between us and her, and the futile attempts of the internet to bridge the gap, conjuring up a vision of Oklou as seen by machine vision. The single and album art comprises saturated, high-exposure images that resemble an homage to The Blair Witch Project via Apple Photo Booth. In the video for Take Me by the Hand, she exists in her own world, projected onto a cinema screen in an empty theatre, as Bladee beams into his feature as a ghostly light. The video for Family and Friends is shot from the wandering eye of an iPhone camera, which deviates and detours from its subjects.
Throughout Mayniel’s music, there’s a tension between emotion and articulation – an awareness that sound, words, the internet, no matter how cleverly manipulated, can never fully capture the raw intensity of feeling or the seared-into-the-grey-matter nature of formative memories. Nowhere is this clearer than on Choke Enough’s title track – a song which sees life and death locked in a tender dance. Instrumentally, it’s a soft and delicate newborn, featuring a submerged synth that Mayniel describes as sounding like a “womb”. Lyrically, it taps into the artist’s death drive, with the chilly refrain of “crash this car to take a photo”. The words are informed by a moment where Mayniel was so in sync with music that she almost lost control. “The lyrics are inspired by an actual drive I did in LA. I felt so connected [to the music I was listening to] that it put me in some sort of transcendental state while driving,” she explains. “I noticed that I was not so focused on the act of driving, which was pretty dangerous, but I felt this thrill of life.”
Back in our respective locations – New York for Mayniel and London for me – we’re spilling over our allotted time and are told to get ready to exit the online playpen of our laptop screens and reenter the world once more. But before she goes, Mayniel is keen to emphasise the ways this pivotal song – and the even more pivotal moment that inspired it – can help bring so much of the emotive, intuitive and oddly sensual music on Choke Enough into focus. “It’s this quest – how far I will go to seek sensation.” In our society of the digital spectacle, where life itself is replaced by its mere representation, endless mimesis on social media and circular digital discourse, Mayniel’s work stands out. Powering her delicate, naive soundscapes is a molten emotional core that sparks a dialogue with our own humanity – the beat of a primal, human heart that’s impossible to ignore.
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Choke Enough is out 7 February on True Pather / Because
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