Choke Enough: CD

"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.