Oklou Tickets

"choke enough is a very intense album for me. it’s filled with directions, tentatives, irregularities, reflecting my last years on this planet, as my heart and conscience has really decentered from myself” says Marylou Mayniel, aka Oklou.  

Dreams, nostalgia and fantasy are the themes of her debut album ‘choke enough’. It is the perfect balance between reality and imagination. 

After establishing herself as one of the most promising artists of her generation, collaborating with names like Flume, 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 Frenchwoman took the time to reflect on her career and her desires.  

Choke enough is therefore a first album imagined as a reflection on the very status of the artist, lulled by productions that are the signature of the “Oklou” style, between assumed ambient sounds (nourished by intensive listening to instrumental music) and rhythms that are more reminiscent of club energy (as in the title “Harvest Sky” with underscores, a brilliant punk artist based in New York). Its eponymous title, “Choked Enough,” reflects this desperate quest for sensations, the need to be touched by grandiose events. “It’s the first song on the project,” explains the artist. “I remember listening to it in my car in Los Angeles, on one of those huge roads that circle the city. I parked in a dark corner, a sort of wasteland, and the words came suddenly, like a burst. A need to tell the story of my pursuit of intense emotions.” A bit like his own father, in a permanent struggle against a dreary daily life, dictated by a careerist society. 

Oklou is part of this generation of artists born on the Internet, whose virtual identity is inseparable from their creative journey. After classical training, learning the piano and cello, it was her computer that marked the young woman's entry into the world of electronic music, which remains hers to this day. A path that has notably facilitated her international opening, through collaborations with Mura Masa, A. G. Cook or EASYFUN (both producers of Brat, Charli xcx's latest event album) and especially through a long tour, to promote Galore, her first mixtape (2020, Because Music). A real turning point in Oklou's artistic life, which has allowed her to make a place for herself at the heart of the international electronic scene (Boiler Room, NTS Session, Colors), thanks to her innovative vision hailed by a demanding press, her productions recognizable among thousands for their intimate and hushed aspect and concerts all over France (in Paris for two sold-out dates at Hasard Ludique, then two following sold-out dates at the Gaîté Lyrique) and in the world (she provided the opening acts for Oneohtrix Point Never or Caroline Polachek). 

If galore was born from an "emotional bubble", as Oklou herself specifies, Choke enough, her first album, is in every way its opposite. “This album is less about me, and more about the things I’ve observed,” she comments, as if in a desire to kill her own ego. Thus, this new opus took its time – 2 and a half years, to be exact. To bring it to life, the singer and producer teamed up, as is her habit, with producer Casey MQ. The result is an opus mixing pop and ambient, partly influenced by her peers in the electronic scene, but also by her own experiences and, above all, her doubts. Choked enough is therefore this: the crystallization of the questions of an artist in search of a collective. A permanent struggle between the most baroque imagination (like the ship evoked in “endless”) and the most trivial daily life. “I see it as built on permanent back-and-forths between a life anchored in reality and another path that takes its roots in fantasies”. A bit like the artist’s own parents, two radical people “in their philosophy of life as in the way they perceive beauty” explains Oklou. 

For this new opus, the artist’s own voice is in all its states, like the experiments that have defined the British hyperpop scene of recent years. Indeed, producer Danny L Harle, whose advice is always valuable, also participated in the making of the album (he is also behind Radical Optimism, Dua Lipa's latest album), and rapper Bladee, a pioneer of hyperpop and a distinguished member of the Drain Gang artist collective (one of the most important musical collectives of the 2010s in Sweden) joins in for a collaboration on the track "take my by the hand". 

"I can't imagine a life without dreams, without spending time appreciating beauty, but I need to be anchored to the ground to continue paying attention to what's happening around me," Oklou assures us. With Choked Enough, she places herself at the perfect balance between reality and imagination. "Are you human? Are you even alive?" she asks in the track "family & friends", as if in an ultimate quest for truth.