Odalie describes herself as an intuitive composer, because music comes naturally from her experiments just by playing with her synths. Together, these stories give life to her debut album, Puissante Vulnérabilité, an intimate and deep project that’s been brewing for more than 2 years. Odalie, however, didn’t find her calling in a conventional way. It was working on the radio and by manipulating background soundtracks for her podcasts that the French electronic music producer had her musical awakening.
Puissante Vulnérabilité is an album full of contrasts and raw emotions, interspersed with moments of quietude and a heavy dose of experimentation, where she assumes a genre-defying position while breaking free from the normative when it comes to music producing. “In this album I’ve also mixed a lot of my influences without wondering if it would be okay in terms of genre, I just did it. That’s why you can find some very experimental tracks and others with voices that are really easier to listen to. They are all parts of what I am as a composer and musician”, she shares.
Harbouring a highly improvisational approach to her production, the album was made from a
collaborative perspective, in part garnered from years as an active member of activist communities. With synthesisers and a computer as her primary instrument, Odalie’s artistry is governed more by her inquisitive spirit than by the restrictions of formal musicality. Here, we connected with the musician to understand a bit more about the production process of this album, her musical upbringing and next career steps.
Listen to the full album…
Read the interview…
Congratulations on your new album! Can you tell us a bit about the tracks and the story behind it?
Thank you, I’m so happy It’s out for everyone to experience it now. There are multiple stories for multiple tracks but as a whole I would say It’s an album full of contrasts and deeply personal. It’s also something I worked a lot on for more than 2 years, modeling everything to make it sound as I wanted. That’s my first work where I feel I achieved something in terms of sound and now I can build on these strong roots to follow this path towards the rest of my musical journey.
In this album I’ve also mixed a lot of my influences without wondering if it would be okay in terms of genre, I just did it. That’s why you can find some very experimental tracks and others with voices that are really easier to listen to. They are all parts of what I am as a composer and musician.
“We are Nature” is an hymn to the beauty of Nature and the interconnetion we have with it as human, “Orages intérieurs” is more about an internal struggle for freedom and trying to reach sadness, “Battements” is in between, dramatic and sad but full of vital energy and madness.
How did you first get into music, and who were your earliest influences?
I got into music in a really original way: my first job was to speak on radio shows for Radiofrance (the national radio in France) and at one point I started to make these reports about subjects I wanted to explain (mainly social and political) in an audio format, like podcasts (no one was listening to podcasts at this time, it was 10 years ago).
I was really familiar with microphones and cutting sound because of my work and I needed the music to put in the background of the reports so I started doing kind of ambient music to put on these. I’m a perfectionist so I listened to a lot of artists to make something good and then at one point I told myself that the music without any words on it would be great too.
I didn’t have any background in music, so it was really bad. I had trouble with harmonies, rhythms, everything to be honest, but I listened to a lot of music and started to understand what I needed to do to make it sound better. At first it was mostly John Hopkins, Chapelier Fou, Saycet and Ocoeur who inspired me to create these music : something in between cinematic and deeply electronic productions.
My early early listenings, when I was a teenager, were with film composer like Hans zimmer, or Dead can dance because Lisa Gerard was singing in Gladiator for Hans Zimmer.
My family has no musical or artistic background and I didn’t play any instruments before. But I’ve always been really comfortable working with computers and softwares and that’s a real quality when you start producing electronic music.
At one point I felt the need to get better with harmonies, rhythms, mixes and push my ideas further, and that’s when I got into a public music school in my city Villeurbanne, France, that provided electronic music classes.
It was an audition, and I was as scared to have the position as not to have it, at the same time. I told my future teacher: “You know I know nothing about music, right?” and he told me “Techniques you can learn, ideas you cannot.Your ideas are strong, you experiment, everything will be alright.” My teacher is an incredible teacher and human. I learned so much from him. I spent almost 3 years in this school (I was working with small jobs at the same time), working everyday on my music to get better and this led to my first EP, in 2018.
How do you approach the creative process when writing and producing your music?
I’m a really intuitive composer, most of the time I have feelings I want to put in the music but it comes by just making sounds with my synths. I can have trouble with attention so I need to find myself something to “play with”, I do little games with myself “this time I will work only on drums, doing wind like movements”, or “ I’ve heard a sound from this track from this artist I like but It’s with a cello, if I try to reproduce this with my synth what will happen?”
I compose really fast the first draft to not get lost in complicated and technical stuff and keep the first feeling, sometimes in just one day, I always do too much sound designs and I have it all other my Ableton sessions : I’m found of sound design and It’s really difficult for me to not love every unique sound too much.
The second step is much harder because I need to mix and make choices and that can take weeks or months because I want to keep and hear everything but you can’t : Mixing is about choices, what is leading and what is on the background, like a painting. I mixed this album all by myself. I think that’s why you can hear lots of different things by listening to the track multiple times, there are details everywhere.
Can you share a pivotal moment in your career that you think helped shape who you are as an artist today?
Definitely my teacher in music school, who got me on a modular synth for the first time : I could have never be where I am without his help with my music production. Of course I worked like never before because I found my path with music but when someone trusts you, your work and the capacity you have at getting better it means the world.
I was also with other students learning electronic music and we had a really collaborative way of learning from each other. I’m a collaborative person, I love people, and all of what I do there is collaboration inside.
How would you define your artistic essence today?
Always moving, I’m more driven by intuition and possibilities, so I would say I have no fixed essence? I’m inspired by so many different arts, from books, to paintings, to looking at beautiful landscapes or having beautiful moments with my friends.
I think it’s even complicated to find a genre to this album because I took the liberty to not define it, there is a lot of contrasts inside and that’s what I want to keep : movement.
“Puissante Vulnérabilité” explores themes of vulnerability and strength. What inspired you to delve into this profound subject matter for your music?
It was a lot by reading books from philosophers I love, journalists, podcasts I listened to and this subject was always coming back to me. I wanted to connect humans and nature.
In Nature, competition is far less central than cooperation: elder trees protect young shoots from strong winds, the sun, and keep the soil moist. Whereas we often speak of the law of nature, to justify the individualistic behaviours, researchers have proven the opposite. The law of nature is in fact based on a subtle balance between many entities and many living worlds, connected in spite of themselves and yet deeply interdependent.
Competition without boundaries is an endless race, it erases human bonds, bonds to the living, and it is this great emptiness that drives us to seek comfort in a frantic consumerism.
For me we are in a great sensitivity crisis, an impoverishment of the way we feel, perceive things and the way we bond. If we see others and nature as a means, some setting, a pool of resources, we do not love anymore.
The ecologic crisis is more than a simple crisis of human societies on one hand and the living on the other. It is a crisis of our relation to the living. Often this connection, that we have trouble to feel, is a protection against unhealed wounds, weaknesses left unremedied, vulnerabilities that we hide to not seem fragile and keep playing the game of the law of the strongest.
Yet the relationship in itself is our purpose. The new-born human being is of such fragility that he is extremely dependant on others. It is this paradox that is one of the conditions for the extraordinary development of mutual aid amongst humans. It is our extreme vulnerability at birth that made our specie powerful.
This intense connection to others makes us the sentient brain of the universe, it gives us an altruism that has to be sought in empathy : this ability to read one’s heart.
To consider one’s feeling is to feel more alive, and it is what holds us to our humanity.
Your album has been described as a transformative journey. Could you share some insights into the emotions and narratives you aimed to convey through your music?
I do music to strengthen my weaknesses, to embrace what makes me vulnerable, because those are what make, in my opinion, my soul beautiful, with all the fires within that make me who I am.
It is a process to cleanse my sufferings, but also to let me glimpse that I deserve the love I get. It’s a really introspective process.
It’s what I wanted to express in these tracks that are deeply personal but can be profoundly universal too because I think we relate to each other through our vulnerabilities. I chose to transform my sufferings and my sorrows into beauty. Like a long dream towards unveiling and finding what makes me unique. And as you might have seen, there is always contrasts, lights and more darkest moments in my music: that’s humanity.
To show yourself as vulnerable is a strength, and to show sensibility today is extremely transgressive in my opinion. In front of the ecologic and politic crisis we go through, to create a rich culture of bonding, to others and to nature, authentic and sensible: that is revolutionary.
It is as well, opening a path towards the start of a form of humility that we sorely need.
How has your activism influenced your artistry and the messages you convey in your music?
My years of strong activism were about finding freedom. I wasn’t a musician back then and was doing journalism with sound reports as an independent. I was strongly committed to fighting against bad housing and was living in politic / artistic squat.
That’s also my encounter with art because I started to organise festivals to support different movements and worked with artists, organising free parties in abandoned places or public spaces.
I was also already really involved in feminist movements. It influences my artistry because for example on this album I worked with persons that are involved in the same collective for gender equality in music, “Collectif trajectoires” as me and are all from my town. I find your local scene so important to defend.
I consider music the best way to pass on ideas because music is really about feelings and people move and revolt themselves when they’re feeling something. I’m also working on some sound installations right now where I can put my work as a journalist and as a musician in the same time. That’s kind of my next goal to find an artistic form to do interviews again about the subjects that matter to me with the thinkers and philosophers that inspire me with my music as a guide through all this. And my subject will be of course Vulnerability as strength.
Looking ahead, what are your aspirations and goals as a musician?
I think I just want to be understood and seen as I am. My goals are to find ways to pass on messages, make people feel things. I’m always so touched when I see people cry at my concerts, for me It’s a beautiful achievement to allow people to let go.
I don’t really want to be famous I think, and of course I can’t, I’m making niche music !
Maybe my goal is to have a strong community of “fans” supporting my music because It’s valuable for them that these tracks exist. Building a community might be a good goal.
Finally, what’s next for you in your musical journey, and what are you most looking forward to in the future?
Make gigs to defend the album on stage, I hope to go as far as possible with it to spread the world but trying to be responsible about touring at the same time. I’m trying to not go too far for just a 30 minutes gig, that would make no sense, but in the same time I need to defend my music on stage and find my audience so that’s a difficult question for me right now! I’m also back in the studio to compose new music, look forward to have time to return in the introspective phase of being with myself and my synths : that’s what I most look forward.
This year I’m composing for multiple shows for theatre and contemporary dance, I would really like to partnered more on this kind of project, video games for example. I love immersive form, working in a dome for example, with surround speakers system, I already worked on this kind of immersive space multiple time and in the future I want to create a show for dome but It’s a two, three years goal!