Oklou's Live Show Bends Light and Sound Into an Ever-Evolving Experience at The 9:30 Club

As of late, electronic-pop music tends to lean into two categories. Minimalism with a heavy focus on lyricism and vulnerability. Think of Lorde. Or maximalist layered tracks that ultimately progress to revelation through large choruses, or one-off, heavily sequenced drops. Think of underscores or Tiffany Day. As always, there's space in between, and nothing is black or white.

However, Oklou's debut record choke enough takes a different route. It's pop that relies on its instrumental saturation, lushness, and auditory space to create emotions. It sounds alien and desolate while retaining deep levels of humanity. It's electronic minimalism, where everything in its structure is warped, phased, or pitch-shifted to create otherworldly soundscapes. Sprinkled in are field recordings, samples, and a search for meaning, understanding, and escapism.

Oklou's live performance aims to transport you to another place, if even for a second. She often starts songs in silhouette, or lit by a singular practical light source, letting your mind run wild about what could be just around the corner. As the synths build, you can feel the energy bounce off the deep shadows. This, combined with the crowd's energy, bottlenecks and freezes the moment.

The second you're lost, the second you get a glimpse of escapism, the second you detach from the other bodies around you, the band explodes.

Light shoots out, the guitar gets phased to the breaking point, and the low end shakes the floor you stand on. It's not a big beat drop, it's not a fist-pumping, crowd-chanting chorus, it's a revelation that pulls you back to the moment. Each layer and instrument hits on a different frequency, making 5-10 layers sound like a symphony. That electronic-built euphoria is exactly what makes seeing her live so special. It's an experience and feeling not many people can pull off. Especially not with the energy and intricacies she brings to the stage.

Seeing “harvest sky” live is a sonic experience I won't forget or relive anytime soon. Watching the crowd be pulled back to earth and jumping up and down in unison to its chorus is a testament to Oklou's strength as a performer. It was also the biggest and loudest they sounded all night. 

The quiet parts resonated with me just as much as the loud ones. The high end on “obvious” lifted a quiet distorted ballad into transcendence. “fall” was met with flashing lights and expansive mids. “want to wanna come back” featured Oklou on guitar and seemed to throw itself out to others. People on the balcony raised their hands to try and get a grasp of it. Oklou evolves and devolves songs quickly, she can move you physically and emotionally in seconds.

Baking in its minimalism, lushness, and space, Oklou's live set hits in all the ways it should. Visually, sonically, and mentally.

I think the biggest thing I've been thinking about since this show is why does music that sounds so distorted, alien, and desolate resonate so strongly with me and others? In an age where art and individualism is under attack from technology and machine learning, why does music so heavily rooted in electronic distortion sound so human? Why does it move us more than hearing a piano ballad? I think these questions sent me down a little bit of an existential rabbit hole.

I think electronic music pushes the boundary of what we view as human. It forces our brains to work harder to connect experimental sounds to human emotion. We have to dig deeper into what the narrator is trying to tell us. The link between human experience and inhuman sound is harder to obtain, and thus is more satisfying and complete.

It's a scary thought that one day Oklou's music might be miserably emulated by a machine. That AI might catch on and be trained to emulate what was once considered experimental and groundbreaking. Once a machine can recreate it, does it mean it's not experimental or groundbreaking anymore? Does this mean music is going to evolve into a rat race of humans creating increasingly inhuman sounds to try and convince another human that it isn't made by a machine trained to recreate human sounds?

What will the product of that sound like?

Is our only escape from this seemingly inevitable cycle ignorance? Or should we all drown an acoustic guitar in so many effects that it's unrecognizable, and try to associate an emotion with something driven so far from what can be naturally created?

Oklou doesn't present a clear answer for this — after all, her music isn't about that. But I think her work's sonic profile speaks to individualism and artistic excellence. I think it speaks to her ability to make us think. I think it also puts into perspective how unintentionally ahead of her time Oklou might truly be.

I think we have to try and live presently when digesting art as complicated and beautiful as this. Try and experience what it means to you and to others. We should try to live in the subconscious emotion then, and process what we felt later. I urge you to live in performances, and let it simmer with you after. 

When Oklou played her last encore, “blade bird”, it was hard not to be moved. It was hard to ignore the 1,200 people screaming it back at her. The easiest part? Falling into the euphoria and humanity found in her music.

Keep up with Oklou here