The album Puissante Vulnérabilité is a project that revolves around contradictions and is an invitation to expose one’s weaknesses, an attitude that the French musician Sophie Griffon, alias Odalie, claims as a good starting point for changing the world around us. The intention is to depict one of the key principles on which nature is based, that is, “the subtle balance between entities and living worlds”. Odalie represents this relationship through the use of machines, softwares and orchestral instruments. Puissante Vulnérabilité presents itself with a multitude of facets that essentially investigate our weaknesses and the relationship between human beings and nature, giving the listener a great lesson, that of learning to accept oneself.
The concept of your new album is inspired by the balance in the natural world. How did you manage to translate this concept into your compositions?
I work a lot with spaces, that’s actually the first thing I think about when composing a track, where the FX will take place. I’m always thinking about creatures living in the space of sound, you can manage this pretty well with some reverb placements nowadays, morphing, getting close, far and then above or underneath. I was really inspired by the electroacoustic music also known as the Musique concrète from the 40s: music specifically composed for speakers, opposed to a live performance. When you participate to this kind of performances, with different speakers all around, you feel like the sounds inhabits the space everything reverberates. The speakers allow the sound to live in the place, to go around you.
I really try to make my synths live their lives, breathe and be «autonomous» in the composition. It’s like creating an actual living world full of tiny creatures or bigger ones, I see them like interdependent planets with balanced ecosystems. They often answer to each other and when I give instructions to my cellist I often speak with images from the natural world, “play like a leaf falling from a tree”, “play like you’re cuddling the tiniest creature that ever lived”. I create microcosms, and it’s funny to do.
This album is about contradictions
but also about showing your vulnerability, which is a good starting point to change the world around you
How did you manage to mix a project with strong experimental connotations with the formal dogmas of music? Do you think these two ways of making music can coexist?
That’s a really good question. It is a really hard path to follow, to be honest. I try to be in between all the time. In life, for example, I have strong opinions on things but I also like to be an open door, a starting point to go further, taking you by the hand to make you discover new things. That’s what I’m trying to do with my music. We try to classify music a little bit too much, in my opinion, and I know that the fact that my music is really difficult to classify can be a pain for media coverage or to get booked for gigs.
I also think that this classification is bad for musicians: trying to stand up to standards of genre can block creativity. The musicians we admire the most were innovators, they didn’t want to reproduce something by someone else. A result of classification is that if you play in an experimental venue it’s really hard to play in a more popular one afterwards, and the other way around. I think it’s a shame because the audience is really not the same and it could be valuable for everyone.
What I prefer in music is the fusion of genre, musicians with a classical background or jazz background playing with electronic musicians that have no academic trained knowledge. When this doesn’t happen, is bad for the audience too, because it’s a lack of openness. If you really like techno, for example, you might also like other genre but you stick to techno just because one day you said “I only like techno.” Big thank you to the producers making genre-bending techno, we need you! I’m happy to be an entrance to the more experimental music, that’s a place where I feel comfortable. For that I changed some things in my compositional process, for example the duration of the tracks. I used to do 8 minutes tracks and now I’m trying to take my experimental ideas into 5/6 minutes, taking people by the hand to discover a world full of experimentations and nowness.
In your latest work you tried to explore the world of contradictions, what do you think are the biggest contradictions of modern life?
The first thing that comes to my mind is that we have never been that evolved and that rich as a society and, at the same time, the number of people that is poor or very badly paid or in burnout is increasing everyday. We never had that many tools to organize our life and at the same time so little time. The world’s 26 richest people own as much capital as the poorest 3.8 billion humans combined. We’re wealthier, healthier, safer, better informed and more prosperous than ever before but the world we live in makes us sad and pessimistic (and for good reasons, like climate crisis). Robots are making art while people have meaningless jobs. I’m an optimist and an utopist: I believe in local struggles and I try to make my part by talking about the subjects I care about. This album is about contradictions but is also about showing your vulnerability, which is a good starting point to change the world around you. A simple but effective point.
We are, as humans, the sentient part of the universe and that’s something we should celebrate
In Puissante Vulnérabilitè there are moments of stillness that are a call to silence. In personal terms, what is silence to you, what does it represent in your life, what image would you associate it with?
I have an enormous sensitivity to sound, so silence is a relief. It is really present in my music because silences can be meaningful. People allowing themselves to be in silence with others are brave enough to show themselves vulnerable. I love that feeling of being with someone I don’t know yet and stay in silence, it’s a beautiful feeling. I’m a contemplative person, I like to stay in silence and listen to spaces, caves, churches, the spaces that resonate the most.
There is this French author I love, Alain Damasio, who is really passionate about music and for my degree in Electro-acoustic I did a piece of music inspired by his novel So phare away. The title comes from an expression between French and English, where phare means lighthouse in French and it can be understood as far. The lighthouse is far. It is the story of people forced to live in lighthouses who can only communicate through light. But the big lighthouses from corporations broadcasting lights signals all the time prevent normal people to communicate. There is this quote I love that talks about light but can be effective for sound as well. I will try to badly translate it (sorry for that, Alain).
«Dans un monde où tout le monde croit devoir s’exprimer, il n’y a plus d’illumination possible. Rien ne peut être éclairé dans la luminance totale. Il faut beaucoup de silence pour entendre une note. Il faut beaucoup de nuit pour qu’un éclair puisse jaillir, pour qu’une couleur neuve soit perçue, soit reçue. Si j’en avais le pouvoir, j’émettrais aujourd’hui un trou noir. Quelque chose comme un cône d’extinction forant au ventre l’épaisseur du jour. Pour rouvrir l’espace. Ce qui me terrifie, ce n’est pas ce chaos de clartés qui brouille la ville comme une avalanche de soleils. C’est qu’il n’y ait plus nulle part une seule ombre. Tout est férocement surexposé.»
«In a world where everyone believes they have to express themselves, there is no longer any possible enlightenment. Nothing can be illuminated in full luminance. It takes a lot of silence to hear a note. It takes a lot of night for a flash to flash, for a new color to be perceived, to be received. If I had the power, I would emit a black hole today. Something like a cone of extinction drilling in the belly the thickness of the day. To reopen space. What terrifies me is not this chaos of light that blurs the city like an avalanche of suns. It is that there is no longer a single shadow anywhere. Everything is fiercely overexposed.»
That’s what I think about silence, in music and in my personal life.
In my melancholy there is always the light after the clouds, far away, and I stare at it in a contemplative state, with a beautiful sadness
In your artistic life which vulnerabilities of your character have you discovered? Were you able to later turn them into strengths?
Underneath all my joy to live, I’m kind of a stressed-out, control freak person that wants everything to be perfect. This can be an issue that gives me – like to almost everyone, I think – anxiety troubles. I turn this into a strength when it allows me to be a perfectionist in music, looking at all the details and tweaking the sounds for hours until I find the perfection I’m seeking for. I worked a lot on myself to turn this defect into something I could use and not be paralyzed by my perfectionism. This also made me really organized on work. I work a lot, all the time, on a lot of different projects, with different people: I’m doing contemporary dance creations with choreographers, digital arts installations, music for theater. I’m always in residencies, moving to different cities. On a long term, if you want all this to work well, you need to be really organized.
What is melancholy to you and how would you tell it with images?
I don’t associate melancholy to depression. I really love melancholy, that’s my favorite feeling. In my head I associate it to when I see that something is not there anymore, but that’s alright because I know there will be something else one day and I just have to wait for the wave to pass. In my melancholy there is always the light after the clouds, far away, and I stare at it in a contemplative state, with a beautiful sadness. Victor Hugo said «Melancholy is the happiness of being sad». I really like to cry, that’s such a relieve, I cry for happy things, bad things, I cry when I watch a movie, when I listen to a song, when I have to say goodbye to a friend, I’m a bundle of feelings. I think no one should be ashamed about that, that’s beautiful, we are, as humans, the sentient part of the universe and that’s something we should celebrate. I love when people cry at my concerts, come to cry together!
