Deliquescent Sonic Patterns.
A chat with Owelle.
Some weekends I work at Bordello A Parigi where I take this opportunity to play one of my favorite radio stations, Couleur 3. It helps me stay in spirit with Switzerland, specifically the French speaking part. Particularly this one person named Bowmore who has their own radio show on it titled Club Selectors, showcases Helvetian talent that you should be paying attention to. Through this beautifully archived roaster is where this story begins in how I discovered Owelle.
Although rooted in Geneva's modern day club scene, Owelle's experimentation with sound and visual installations births a different take on current Electronic Dance Music trends. Diligent yet without boundaries. Comprising of her soft spoken voice and flowing pads reminiscent of the Rhône's currents, holding each other's hand to cushion the blow from her quaking basses and beats as she submerges you in the coldest waters of her world.
Steadily becoming a household name for locals and championed by international talent you might be familiar with, Owelle's recent release on Creaked records have already made waves that drown out mischief. Despite meeting for the first time in person last summer, seeing her perform at her residency with e-garbage in Canal 54 or making her debut in Switzerland's largest festival Paléo only further entranced us in excitement of her debut on Dee Dee's Picks.
“Owelle": frenchified word derived from the English expression “Oh well”. Repurposed by Valérie Siron as her pseudonym to reflect her work ethos: serious, but without making a fuss.
Surfacing from Geneva’s club culture with a graphic design background, Owelle’s drive to synergise the audio and the visual power her expression of creative identity. Her compositions are imagined and built without boundaries, albeit replete with nods to previous genres ranging from early 2000s breakbeat, braindance and broken beat techno.
Intrigued by sensory immersion, Owelle further laces her art with interactive tools including programming, sound spatialisation and installation. Diving into a spatiotemporal journey, subtly incorporating their uses into her musical works. By blending her passion for diligent sound designing, field recordings and psychedelic vocals is how Owelle presents her approach to experimental music. Owelle’s creativity offers an intrinsic connection of her tailored rhythms and melodies to birth an original hybrid of sound and visual art.
The music within this record questions the importance of sound in relation to the individual’s environment. To blur the border between noise and aesthetically pleasing. To ride the waves between discomfort and delight and to find the potentially hidden role of situational awareness and relating it to musical endeavours derived from the emotions within.
Although having mainly specialised my academia in graphic design whilst having a strong grip on music, my creative approach to these mediums of expression are completely different. Distinguished and separate. Especially in the work process and as entities in how you wish to represent these two mediums. In regards to music, its creation and therefore production, is in a sense with more risk. To further elaborate, the perception of sonic art and what qualifies it as “good” is a lot more abstract than that of image. For instance, to ensure the success of a light or visual show, there is less chance that people become overwhelmed by its elements, such as the brightness of the light.
This is in opposition to music, where frequencies that are too prominent can be heard as unpleasant and inordinate. Other more technical factors, as a means to further exemplify, is turning on speakers before the amplifier which may result in unwelcome consequences. My point is that there is a mysticism with sound, an underlying challenge and therefore more rules to break.
It is harder to describe a sound as “warm” as it can imply different meanings according to who you ask. As opposed to a colour, using the same adjective relates usually in gradients of red. I find that there is more of a common language, a dictionary if you will, when it comes to visuals as opposed to audio. It can be harder to associate a certain sound with a specific word.
Even today, some of my favourite records are produced and mixed in an unorthodox and perhaps erroneous fashion, with clashing frequencies and misuse of some recording techniques (at least in objective engineering terms). But regardless of these remarks, although they are technically wrong, they still sound really good! At least in an idiosyncratic, aesthetically pleasing kind of way. This makes me more inquisitive and dive deeper into the realms of sound design because there is such unpredictability, lack of logic and questions to be sought after.
Since both, audio and visual, are such important but equal practices in my life, I don't try to balance them. All of the different channels of expression when it comes to relating experimentation to my creative identity are in the end, coming from the same core emotion. Lacking spontaneity and thinking too much about such choices would mean I lose an element of my creative process. As I am constantly exploring different ways of expression, I don't want to restrict myself through branding and labelling my own work to understand it better. It prevents me from being self-indulgent. Ironically, I would say that this statement is considered as my brand and label. But in my case, I’d rather evoque an extension of myself. A means to showcase something intangible made from countless hours, codes and technical parameters, to therefore create a scope for the premise of a unique piece of work to reflect my own personality.
It is important for me to retain this form of hybridisation when it comes to my work. You interpret it as you want. As a form of art to challenge your listening habits and/or to entertain yourself. Forget being restricted by a behavioural premise that is expected when it comes to genres. Let the art define yourself as you are defining it. Your perception and interpretation are your own.
It’s peculiar, since I don't have a particular fascination with remembering the past from a musical standpoint. Or imitating others for that matter. I'd rather acknowledge it by making an homage to the ones before me by incorporating some rehashed EDM samples into my creative mixture. To understand the present and build the future you do need to acknowledge the past.
Despite my music being emphasised by heavy kicks and rhythmic sections, my first inspiration, the premise of a track identity, is led by melodies or chords.
There was no predefined concept or procedure when I was producing It’s Okay. As a graphic designer, most of my mandates are already followed by guidelines and instructions as opposed to self-initiated work. When we were talking about releasing through Dee Dee’s Picks, I was pretty insistent that I did not want to write another album based on a specific theme. But because these tracks were written within the same year, fully produced in Ableton, a correlation naturally developed between them. Eventually, the presence of a theme became very apparent. Not wanting to be guided by a theme was also partly due to the fact that I was always given instructions for projects throughout university. The thing with this is that it can become too restricting and following a theme can lead to creative blockades and loss of interest in the project. I really wanted to free myself from such constraints and rather compose tracks that went well together, that I felt like making on the spot and being relevant in the moment. I much preferred this approach as it gave me more insight into what I achieved throughout the year, personally and professionally.
Observing these tracks all together, side by side, presented itself with a correlation on its own. If I would have composed all of these tracks within a week, they would have been in relation to a theme towards what I felt within this time frame. I don't like the idea of being forced into a concept because then you tend to question yourself constantly whether these tracks go together, match a theme, or are they relevant… and for this record I really did not want to doubt myself. Self-reflection? Sure, but I wanted to focus on authenticity as opposed to making things up to match a preconceived notion. It's called hindsight. Themes derived by ideas present themselves later on anyhow. They always do.
This said, after a cathartic moment from the record’s completion, the story behind it came to light. I now find that the point of It’s Okay to be a matter of incorporating newer, intense life-changing moments with situations that make me feel grounded by a more serene time. It is by merging the two together as a means to juxtapose each other and glueing it all together with what you already know. ‘Lucid’ signifies having an ability to think clearly and rationally whereas ‘Paradox’ is a contradictory statement which, when analysed, may prove to be true. At the time when I was naming the tracks for their definitive titles, the words that I used were not necessarily intentional or significant in regard to a chronological tracklist. All of the tracks have a link with words that were very present in my head these past couple of months. Upon their completion, I decided to connect these themes that were present in my head with matching titles. All of these defining moments that are occurring in my life due to my creative works getting more traction and attention are there. I wanted to include such memorable moments in the title of my works as a means to capture these memories and repurpose them into giving the music its individual identity.
They were all thoughts and questions that I was asking myself at the time. Transitioning and merging. Learning and adapting. The track “7.5°C” is a good example of this. How the title came to be is in relation to the following story: As I was growing in popularity, I started having these mood avalanches after my performances. Massive dopamine chutes, tiredness and dismay. With no idea where this was coming from, although I can assume that it is due to such intense moments and pressure, I started looking into solutions for such mood shifts. A suggestion that I found online is to be submerged in very cold water. Since I live within walking distance from the Rhône, I went a handful of times for a swim when it was still wintertime. It was a first and probably something I'd do again, at least during very stressful periods when I need to be self-reflective. The memorability of this event was to match the recurring theme that everything in my life now is new and at times frightening. Therefore why not go for a deep dive into it? Pun intended. Therefore I opted to name the track “7.5°C” as it was the temperature of the water and also because it was the track I was working on the most at that time.
I don’t get a particular thrill in swimming, although some of my previous works evoque water motifs. My relation to it is more on an auditive premise. This actually comes from my immediate surroundings and how the external stimulus from my environment affects my influences and inspirations. The idea of rhythm and textural drones surrounding us, whether through playing tennis, hearing the continuous highway next door, movements of water in the likes of rain droplets or waves have been very influential in how I persevere and generate rhythms and tones, and thus are very relevant in including them in my works.
The thing is that some of these organic sounds are often used for meditation music, something about them being so soothing. Of course, you can include your real immediate surroundings such as construction works or street traffic for the sake of intensity, but I rather use sounds that are representative of my serene moments. Since I had worked on projects which consisted of using household objects with some sort of rhythmic patterns (dishwasher, clocks ticking), I had some experience in merging my surroundings and adapting them in a musical context. This practice was therefore adopted once again to produce this album, although perhaps in a less literal, specific sense.
This time, for example, I wanted to push my own boundaries by relating them to very personal areas of my mind. “Tennis” for example, because I play with my mother and we bond a lot during these one on one moments. It was only when I gave you the pre-masters that I had this eureka moment that all of these tracks, the story behind and their journey, were pretty much directly derived from my subconscious. Specifically, the moments and places where I felt safe or was experiencing something very new. But it was deliberate to have these sounds in my works as a means to create an emphasis on the intensity and unpredictability that was going on in my life.
Although everything has been working out for the better as soon as one issue was solved, another one or two would surface. Hence perhaps a reason for finishing the album with an open-ended conclusion, a contradictory statement. It’s a whole process of finding yourself, whether going through life or creating a work of art. In my case, I had a clairvoyance in what I wanted to achieve at its genesis, lucidity. But then ended up with an open ended conclusion, a paradox, which suits me just fine, as it leaves me with a (or not) appeasing question mark on what will happen next. Therefore to conclude this train of thought, the idea of the artwork was exactly based on that.
As I am going through immense shifts in life, my mother was always there for me, whether it has been personal matters or supporting my work. While I was pondering on what to use as an artwork, I was experiencing a lot of insomnia due to being exposed to this lifestyle. Even though I was technically on holiday at the time, I still felt like I couldn't fully decompress and detach. I was always on the look-out in anticipation of what could happen next. Sometimes, I couldn't let go and enjoy the present because I had a lot of things on my mind regarding this career. I was a bit in a turmoil, so I asked to spend the evening with my mother watching old childhood video tapes of me in order to ground myself and perhaps derive some inspiration from my inner child. We were watching a very old film of myself swimming in the lake whilst being pulled by my mother. Not dragged in an aggressive manner, but rather guiding me along the waves by holding my arm. Soothing glides. We both were laughing a lot watching it because there was a lot of innocence.
An utterance that tomorrow will be fine as well as being an amalgamation of serenity, positive apathy and mother and child connection. It’s something that spoke to me immensely. And so I took a screenshot of this very powerful mother and daughter moment and opted to use it as the album cover. Two women against the waves. But to be honest, I will likely return occasionally to this picture, because for me it is a statement. A visual representation that no matter what happens, it acts as a reminder, to envoy through the difficult motions and whisper in my ear as I reach this inner peace; “Oh well, it’s okay!”.”
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