OKLOU - Choke Enough [CD]

Because Music

£12.56

Format: CD
Catalogue No.: BEC5615145
Barcode: 5056556151456
Release Date: 07 Feb 2025
Genre: Synth-pop

1- endless
2- thank you for recording
3- family and friends
4- obvious
5- ict
6- choke enough
7- (;´༎ຶٹ༎ຶ`)
8- take me by the hand
9- plague dogs
10- forces
11- harvest sky
12- want to wanna come back
13- blade bird

BIOGRAPHY
"choke enough is a very intense album for me. It’s filled with directions, tentatives
and irregularities, reflecting my last years on this planet as my heart and conscience
has really decentered from myself”, says Marylou Mayniel, aka Oklou.
"Each song calls for a different path, trying to guess which one to follow.
Probably as some sort of quest for sense and purpose, in these times where the
obsession with self development and self achievement is something I relate with
less and less".
After establishing herself as one of the most promising artists of her generation,
collaborating with names like Mura Masa, Pomme and Flavien Berger, and remixing
stars including Dua Lipa and Angèle (Fever), Caroline Polachek (Door) and A.G.
Cook (Being Harsh), the French artist took the time to reflect on both her career and
her desires, and the result is choke enough.
The album maps an emotional landscape. Warm, beautiful productions that are the
signature of the Oklou style are throughout; pairing ambient sounds with minimal
club rhythms, delicate synthesizer arpeggios and found sound samples. The
album’s title track, ‘choke enough’, is an embodiment of the project’s quest for
meaning, of the need to be touched by anything; a grandiose epiphany or a passing
quotidien moment.
“It’s the first song of the project,” explains Mayniel. “I remember listening to it in my
car in Los Angeles on one of those immense roads that goes around the city. I
parked in a slightly dark corner, a sort of vacant lot, and the words came suddenly,
like a surge. A need to tell my story of my pursuit of intense emotions.”
This relationship with elusive, imperceptible, ephemeral emotions is the key to the
album. It is a reflection on the subconscious and conscious demands of an artistic
psychology, and on the demands of existing and creating in a brief and transient
life.
“I see it as built on a permanent conversation between a life anchored in reality and
another in fantasy”, she says.
Indeed, Mayniel says first single ‘family and friends’ is “searching for answers to
unstated questions, escaping from something intangible, invisible. A memory?
Maybe I like the idea that I’d be running away from something, and I’m looking for
good reasons to run .”
Oklou is part of the generation of artists born on the Internet, whose virtual identity
is inseparable from their creative journey. After classical training in regional France,
learning the piano and cello, it was her computer that introduced her to the world of
electronic music.
After two EPs, 2017’s For The Beasts and 2018’s The Rite Of May, Mayniel received
international acclaim, accelerated through collaborations with Mura Masa, A. G.
Cook and EASYFUN (the last two both producers of Charli xcx’s Brat) and
culminating in her full length mixtape galore in 2020. It was a turning point in her
artistic life, and heralded as an innovative and introspective work by fans and
media. International touring followed, including support tours with Oneohtrix Point
Never and Caroline Polachek.
If galore was born from an "emotional bubble", as Mayniel suggests, choke enough,
her first album, is in every way its opposite. "This album is less about me, and more
about the things I've been able to observe" she comments.
Developed with co-producers Casey MQ, Danny L Harle and A. G. Cook, and
featuring artists Bladee (‘take me by the hand’) and underscores (‘harvest sky’) the
result is a crystallization of her artistic and personal evolution.
“I can’t imagine a life without daydreaming, without spending time appreciating
beauty, but I need to be anchored to the ground to continue paying attention to
what’s happening around me,” Mayniel says.
With choke enough, she places herself at the perfect balance between reality and
imagination. “Are you human? Are you even alive?”, she asks in ‘family and friends’,
as if in an ultimate quest for truth.