Album of the Month: choke enough
A subdued, elegant meander into the quieter side of hyperpop.
I gotta say: this was a stacked early year.
Benito dropped his most consistent album yet, pop-punk upstarts Lambrini Girls danced their way into my heart with a cheeky and ferocious debut, and fka Twigs released a near perfect 90s rave-throwback album. (The one miss on the album, though, has become a festering blight on my listens.)
I was sure I was going to be writing about one of those records. They are all brazen, in your face releases from artists that excite me. I was honing in on the fka Twigs, but then I got this text in my music think-tank group chat:
Now aside from the Ava Max shade, they were right. choke enough, the new album from hyperpop enchantress oklou, is all wonderful.
oklou (pronounced “Okay-Lou”), the artist name of Marylou Mayniel, has been releasing music at a measured, dare I say French, pace for the past decade. To date, oklou has one EP, one mixtape, and, now, one album: choke enough. This slower pace has allowed Mayniel the time to hone a remarkable clarity of sound and lyricism; it reminds me of when the XX came on the scene sounding like that. Similarly, oklou sounds exceedly confident and at home in her particular strain of hyperpop.
In this fantastic interview from the FADER, Mayniel talks about her influences for this record: drumless music, loops, and a focus on what feels good. The whole interview is worth a read, but I found this question and answer particularly enlightening:
FADER: What [do] you enjoy hearing? How would you put that into words?
oklou: “What connects them all, for me, is the fact that I wanted to have fun, work, and take as the basis of the tracks this idea of a loop that I could be listening to forever. Just because I think it sounds close to perfection. Shorter patterns and this idea of a cycle repeating itself forever and ever, and how I can build a pop song on top of that. I've always been very drawn to loops in general. Me and the friends I made along this past 10 years in music, it's something we share, this love and interest for loops and for any type of music that works towards loops: Ambient music, of course, [and] William Basinski; the [Chuck Person's Eccojam's Vol. 1] pieces from Daniel Lopatin from [2010]. And then obviously all the culture around beat making. For me, this focus around my use of my own loops, it's a way for me to connect the dots between all these tracks.”
“But wait- didn’t you say hyperpop?”, you may be asking. “Karsten, are you sure this is that?” Yes, I am! “She said William Basinski- don’t fucking lie to me!” Okay, whoa, let’s take a pause for a second and talk hyperpop.
With the meteoric rise of Charli XCX (a guiding light of mine), many of us are familiar with the term, but just to get us all on the same page, here are some cute graphics I found from the graphic designer hyunmin:
While I love everything hyunmin describes- the maximalism, the kitsch, the chiptune vocals- one of my favorite (and underrated) tools of the genre is missing: the endless build. If the electronic music of the aughts was defined by EDM’s earth shattering drops, part of the hyperpop response included creating songs that were all tension and no release. A. G. Cook, the founder of PC Music and producer on a few of the choke enough tracks, has peddled his endless build wizardry across the years to delightfully delirious effect.
The first time I remember really appreciating the endless build was on Charli XCX’s ‘Silver Cross’. Take a listen:
The mounting drama of the song’s production (the cascading synthesizers, the thundering drums) is mirrored in Charli’s desperate pleas, yet all of the high-octane drama is never resolved! The song leaves you all jacked up with no catharsis! I love it!
oklou pushes this endless build principle even further: over half of the playtime on choke enough is percussion-less. Rather relying on a build and release song structure, oklou explores the power and pleasure that looped, beatless music contains.
Opening with ‘endless’, oklou presents us with a bit of a red herring: the song does, in fact, have percussion and, okay, it even has what could be called a drop. Despite the song’s relatively straightforward synth pop DNA, oklou ends the track with a mystical whisper that haunts most of the song:
“Is the endless still unbound?/
Is the endless still unbound?/
Is the endless still unbound/
Or am I just different now?”
My read on this refrain: what possibilities still await me in my music? Does the endless pleasure that my music once gave me still exist? That ending serves as an invitation to follow oklou into a much stranger and more delicious forest where we may find answers to those questions.
As a matter of fact, ‘thank you for recording’, the very next track, is oklou’s first attempt at an answer. She begins toying with musical motifs that populate the album: synth lines range from sounding like pan flute melodies to gentle thrums that evoke bioluminescent mushrooms lighting up a well-worn path. (There’s going to be a lot of forest imagery in this one, folks).
Oklou continues the song by layering multiple vocal lines over each other that peak in the second chorus:
“A killer's on the loose ten thousand miles away/
Thank you for rеcording (You for recording, ooh)/
My little AV disaster/
I watchеd the house burn down 'cause I know that it has an end/
Thank you for recording (You for recording, ooh)/
My little AV disaster/
There's a tornado swing/
Thank you for recording/
My little AV disaster/
There's a tornado swing and it's rocking me right to sleep/
Thank you for recording (You for recording, ooh)”
Growing up having sung in choirs, oklou knows firsthand the power of the human voice multiplied and, through the magic of loops, she turns herself into a chorus of woodland sprites that dance playfully around you while singing sweet devastation.
If you’re a longtime reader… it may be clear to you that I favor emotionally wet music. And if you’re a new reader… you may be wondering, “what the hell is emotionally wet music?”
Emotionally wet music is full bodily swells, joys and tears and hearts brought right up to your face. In short, it’s music that makes you capital ‘F’ Feel. I was all of eleven years old when I clocked that I liked music like this. I was a huge gamer and I bought Kingdom Hearts: a game where you play as a young boy named Sora and team up with Daffy Duck and Goofy to travel across Disney IPs to save the cartoons of your youth from becoming ‘heartless’, which are little black monsters who have (surprise) lost their hearts. This is the opening video and song:
I mean my god. In hindsight, much of my musical taste can be traced back to these three minutes.
‘choke enough’, the sublime title track, isn’t just emotionally wet, it is emotionally soaked through. I mean, the main lyric is ‘if you get choked up now’! That lyric is repeated again and again over synthesized arpeggios whose crescendos wax and wane like tidal waves comprised of pure passion.
As I listen, overwhelming images flash through my mind: speeding cars in the rain, meeting a deceased father in the afterlife, a rush to capture the momentary beauty of in moonlight. There is barely a beat until about three quarters of the way through the song when everything zeroes out and Mayniel momentarily snaps into clairvoyance before the song echoes off into the distance.
For me, this song is another prime example, no, a proof of Mayniel’s drumless music theory: you don’t need percussion to have impact. The song shakes me to my core yet, without the drums or drop to resolve the tension, the perpetual build and circuity leaves me wanting more and more and more and more and more.
With all my talk of the power of this record, listening to choke enough still remains an evanescent experience. Unlike those other brash releases that gripped me earlier this year, the magic and pleasure lie in its subtly.
Having sat with the record for a few weeks, choke enough reminds me of yet another nocturnal and mysterious cult classic: The Knife’s Silent Shout. Where the Dreijer sibling’s sorcery lies in its pulsing percussion and boogey-woman vocals, oklou conjures playful melodies and macabre lyrics that showcase her dark whimsy. It admittedly took a couple listens for the record to fully take hold on me, but I am now fully under its spell. I hope the enchantment extends to you.
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YES.
Thanks, Karsten, for bringing me somewhat up-to-date. I think I left off somewhere back in the aughts, though I do recall liking the dream pop thing. Other than that, anything with the word pop in it hasn’t been my thing. I like your choice of record, but I particularly like your writing about it. I made the fateful mistake of starting the streaming on my hearing aids - that was a disaster! But when I got in the car, I was able to see what you’re getting at. After a few songs, I began to wonder why anyone would want to have tension without catharsis, or better yet, a danceable percussion track. Don’t we all like those things? Ha ha, old school I know. Keep showing us the avant garde and, slowly, we will follow (maybe)!