OKO DJ: As Above, So Below

"OKO DJ's music is best measured not in decibels but in candle watts. Sunlight, one suspects, would reduce it to ashes. Her debut album, As Above, So Below, is a seance of a record, a journey into the darkest corners of the night. The Athens-based musician, aka Marine Tordjemann, is host of an NTS Radio show called Twisted Dream Diary, and As Above, So Below, is similarly steeped in dream logic and surrealistic visions. In its collision of bleak sounds and cosmic mysticism, it often feels like a gothic take on new-age spirituality. It might be the post-post-punk equivalent of a European art-house film shot in grainy black and white, framing monologues muttered in French and Greek in dramatically austere trappings. It's a mood piece par excellence."

""Exolition" opens the album on a Lynchian note. The scene: part abandoned jazz club, part shamanic ritual. A glowering electric bassline grudgingly shifts its weight between two notes while the drummer taps out a slow, swinging rhythm on cymbals and snares. Someone strums a guitar below the bridge, throwing off an atonal shimmer. Breathy flutes, shakers and castanets, prayer bowls, and the cries of what might be mythical birds lend intrigue, and a witchy voice cackles in the background. "Look!" sighs Tordjemann, launching into a meandering meditation on light, heat, and emotion peppered with burning suns and simmering lava."

The record centers on nocturnal, ritual-inflected atmospheres that marry bleak soundscapes with surreal, dream-logic imagery. Sparse arrangements combine glowering basslines, slow swinging drums, atonal guitar textures, breathy flutes, shakers, castanets, prayer bowls, and distant vocalizations to evoke abandoned clubs and shamanic ceremonies. Tracks shift between dour electronics and sullen rock grooves, moving into big-beat approximations and dense, inkblot-like bass explorations. French and Greek murmured monologues, grainy noir aesthetics, and new-age mysticism converge to produce a mood-driven, art-house soundtrack that privileges texture, atmosphere, and ritual over conventional songcraft.

Read at Pitchfork