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 bulk of the album has been painted with a similarly ascetic palette. “La Colline au Ciel” is more electronic but just as dour, with eerie tones fluttering above a scratchy electronic drumbeat and garbled synth bass, stray synth noises zipping like tracers into the night. “είμαι ή δεν είμαι” grows from sullen rock drumming, slow and methodical, into a kind of no-frills approximation of ’90s big beat, with gurgling synths dripping over overdriven electric bass and onarrivenow’s keening vocalizations. In “Ivres,” thick basslines spread out like inkblots beneath formless guitar plucking and Tordjemann’s tale of a night of drunken decadence. In moments like these, As Above, So Below feels almost like a kind of radio play, less a collection of songs than heavily atmospheric tableaux populated by cryptic characters and dripping with portent.
The album’s lyrics are not publicly available, but listeners with a working knowledge of French and/or Greek—or, as in my case, multi-lingual AI transcription tools and a skeptical eye for errors and hallucinations—will readily pick up on the album’s brooding themes. “είμαι ή δεν είμαι” (“I Am or I Am Not”) is an existentialist meditation on solitude. “Ivres” contains hedonistic images of drunken revelers with “black lips and bulging eyes,” bringing to mind visions of 20th-century bohemians carousing in some grotty basement bar, sticky with absinthe and opium. (For some reason, it evokes for me the wild gaze of Man Ray’s 1922 photograph of Markiza Luisa Casati.) The album’s longest song, the eight-minute “La Colline au Ciel,” takes the form of a travel diary or epistolary tale, stringing together pictures of secluded mountain villages, stone churches, and volcanoes in a reflective, matter-of-fact tone that makes me think of Rachel Cusk’s Outline or Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil.
One of the only (mostly) English-language songs, “Formentera” is a post-punk dirge set on the Balearic island of the same name. “Sacred geometry is everywhere,” whispers Tordjemann, before breaking into a breathless reverie: “Look at pinecones, look at the stone/The spiral movement of air/Look at the trees, look at the leaves/Everything is in peace.” It would be easy for such lines to come off as hokey—to say nothing of the harmonized refrain, “Find a place that resonates with your truth,” the album’s most melodic moment—yet, like any seasoned reader of tea leaves, Tordjemann sells the illusion, and makes a believer of you. Were it not for a momentary burst of Auto-Tune that gives “Formentera” a weird, ultra-contemporary sheen, it would be easy to mistake As Above, So Below for a vintage creation, the kind of thing an enterprising label head might have discovered on an unlabeled Maxell XLII rescued from some waterlogged box in a European flea market. But post-punk pastiche is a dime a dozen. The strange, singular touches that make As Above, So Below harder to place make it all the more fascinating. Like all great obscurities, it thrives in darkness.
