OKO DJ’s music is finest measured not in decibels however in candle watts. Daylight, one suspects, would cut back it to ashes. Her debut album, As Above, So Under, is a seance of a report, a journey into the darkest corners of the night time. The Athens-based musician, aka Marine Tordjemann, is host of an NTS Radio present known as Twisted Dream Diary, and As Above, So Under, is equally steeped in dream logic and surrealistic visions. In its collision of bleak sounds and cosmic mysticism, it typically looks like a gothic tackle new-age spirituality. It is likely to be the post-post-punk equal of a European art-house movie shot in grainy black and white, framing monologues muttered in French and Greek in dramatically austere trappings. It’s a temper piece par excellence.
“Exolition” opens the album on a Lynchian observe. The scene: half deserted jazz membership, half shamanic ritual. A glowering electrical bassline grudgingly shifts its weight between two notes whereas the drummer faucets out a gradual, swinging rhythm on cymbals and snares. Somebody strums a guitar under the bridge, throwing off an atonal shimmer. Breathy flutes, shakers and castanets, prayer bowls, and the cries of what is likely to be legendary birds lend intrigue, and a witchy voice cackles within the background. “Look!” sighs Tordjemann, launching right into a meandering meditation on gentle, warmth, and emotion peppered with burning suns and simmering lava.
The majority of the album has been painted with a equally ascetic palette. “La Colline au Ciel” is extra digital however simply as dour, with eerie tones fluttering above a scratchy digital drumbeat and garbled synth bass, stray synth noises zipping like tracers into the night time. “είμαι ή δεν είμαι” grows from sullen rock drumming, gradual and methodical, right into a sort of no-frills approximation of ’90s massive beat, with gurgling synths dripping over overdriven electrical bass and onarrivenow’s keening vocalizations. In “Ivres,” thick basslines unfold out like inkblots beneath formless guitar plucking and Tordjemann’s story of an evening of drunken decadence. In moments like these, As Above, So Under feels virtually like a sort of radio play, much less a set of songs than closely atmospheric tableaux populated by cryptic characters and dripping with portent.
The album’s lyrics usually are not publicly accessible, however listeners with a working data of French and/or Greek—or, as in my case, multi-lingual AI transcription instruments and a skeptical eye for errors and hallucinations—will readily choose up on the album’s brooding themes. “είμαι ή δεν είμαι” (“I Am or I Am Not”) is an existentialist meditation on solitude. “Ivres” incorporates hedonistic photos of drunken revelers with “black lips and bulging eyes,” bringing to thoughts visions of Twentieth-century bohemians carousing in some grotty basement bar, sticky with absinthe and opium. (For some motive, it evokes for me the wild gaze of Man Ray’s 1922 {photograph} of Markiza Luisa Casati.) The album’s longest track, the eight-minute “La Colline au Ciel,” takes the type of a journey diary or epistolary story, stringing collectively photos of secluded mountain villages, stone church buildings, and volcanoes in a reflective, matter-of-fact tone that makes me consider Rachel Cusk’s Define or Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil.
