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For her second album ‘AI les Axes’, Parisian visual artist & composer Aude Van Wyller aka Oï les Ox (The Death of Rave, Primordial Void, Kraak) returns with a labyrinthine suite of gnarled, spiralling electronics and oblique song forms. Engaging with themes of technological malfunction and identity loss, ‘AI les Axes’ emerges as a captivating fever dream of otherworldly dysfunction.
Alongside protean vocalizations and effervescent soundscapes, Oï les Ox incorporates a dismantled dialogue in her native French that resembles AI-generated vocabulary and syntax, forming an opus of dislocation that arguably carries a greater sense of lyricism and intimacy than her acclaimed debut album ‘Crooner qui coule sous les clous’, released back in 2020 on The Death of Rave & Primordial Void.
With this latest work, Oï les Ox (dis)assembles discordant compositions rich with vertiginous sound poetry and expansive, fragmentary electronics, creating agile music of flux and slippage. Across seven tracks, Van Wyller integrates an uninhibited multiplicity of warped synths, oscillating arias and fugitive sound sources, from the distinctive interjection of a phone notification to the heady inversion of DnB / jungle percussion to the acoustic roil and rustle of myriad sound objects. In this, Oï les Ox envisages a space of deluge and intricacy, where aesthetic reiteration evokes the feeling of déjà-vu, and vocal intonations become like a word map, opening up different pathways of possibility.
Van Wyller describes ‘AI les Axes’ as an album where boundaries dissolve, in the intervals between tracks which collapse through mutable segues, and in the sense of temporal distortion engendered through feats of reversal and contortion. In a work which represents an odyssey for lost selfhood - for the recovery of a concrete individuality - the voice of a central figure leads the way yet is duplicated. The primary self is then disorientated in a choir of artificial voices, and surrounded by a sea of unruly noise. In many ways, ‘AI les Axes’ signals the sound of unravelling.
The seven tracks that comprise ‘AI les Axes’ are the product of a change in process. Where before Van Wyller has engaged in a methodology of patient, progressive edits and live rehearsals, here the music is raw and the result of composing in one take. The aim of this newly adopted approach is to generate a fluency of expression, creating a feeling of development with simple yet transfixing constructions, durational forms and cyclical arrangements. By conceiving this world of free-flowing movement, defined by an overload of harmonic and rhythmic possibilities, Van Wyller reflects the disruption of physical gesture and autonomy in our contemporary, tech-determined existence.
With ‘AI les Axes’, Van Wyller channels visions of modern mystification on an album which embodies both disarrangement and revelation. For the Oï les Ox project, ‘AI les Axes’ suggests that amongst the remnants of a splintered identity, beyond the debris of defective technology, lies an authentic semblance of self.
