The Predatory Wasp
The opening track from Oklou’s new album choke enough is pitch-perfect: icy, sparse beats, billowing melodies and her hushed, gently autotuned vocal. It will have a hard job to surpass her exceptional debut Galore, but signs are good so far.
Oklou has been pretty quiet since the release of her exceptionally good 2020 album Galore; a Sega Bodega collab here, a remix EP there, but very little else. Friends & Family is her first official, original single for a number of years and finds her back in familiar territory: breathy vocals, simple, naive melodies and an unmistakable nostalgic quality emphasised by the home movie quality of the music video. Let’s hope there’s more to come, soon.
August hasn’t been the most exciting month for new releases, but trance is here to save us once again. Four years ago Oklou and Sega Bodega to cover Italian trance titan Maurco Picotto’s Komodo – which I guess was a very low key version of all those celebs getting together to murder Believe in lockdown – and today it gets a wide release, proving once again that trance is Best Genre Of Music. Komodo (Save a Soul) heavily sampled Deep Forest’s Sweet Lullaby, a reworking of which was included in one of my favourite mixes of all time. So many layers!
There’s not a lot to Fall – the opening track on Oklou’s new EP Galore – but what’s there is really rather special: subdued synth line, gently swelling pads and the hushed, intimate vocal. It must have taken a lot of restraint not to push everything into overdrive in the final third, but it works so well. The below video is from her recent Colors show and further highlights how much can be achieved with so little.
The Predatory Wasp 