CGI duo Organs Named They Like You follow a strange creature through stranger spaces, set against the sounds of Danish producer, songwriter, and singer ioulus.
ioulus took the name for her debut mixtape from the writings of legendary ecofeminist, cultural theorist and activist Donna Haraway, who devised the term ‘oddkin’ to describe people connected in ways that transcend conventional relationships within the anthropocene. Applying this term to her own life, ioulus blends experimental production and incisive lyricism to explore and critique her own relationships. “The mixtape reflects a very personal journey of looking at my relationship to myself and to the people that have surrounded me through my life,” she explains. “It deals with my lived reality, touching themes of nostalgia, distrust, mental health, deep sorrow, addiction, love and self worth. It’s a journey of coming to understand the patterns we are being brought into and the patterns we create in our own lives.”
“Because my album is visiting and viewing my own relationships to both myself, other humans and creatures throughout my life, making the video we wanted to create a figure which represented me, but in another form – an everlasting transforming fantasy oddkin form, traveling through a world that at times mimics what we know as the real world and at times just exists as an unknown space of and for thoughts, feelings, and memories.” For the audiovisual accompaniment to the project’s ten tracks, ioulus enlisted the talents of artists Salik Kadita and Lau Andersson, who make work as Organs Named They Like You, to create a series of shifting landscapes through which they follow ioulus’s oddkin avatar.
“We wanted to follow a critter through virtual vacant lands, dwelling in its slow gentle movements,” the duo explain. “The nature here keeps reforming itself through its rooting in digital code, making space for an abstract view on the power of transformation. We consolidated the biomes with the critter, dissolving the border between life and non-life as the code is changing, as the critter is walking, dancing and rising. In this way the eternal opportunity for the space in between becomes visible.” ioulus’s diaristic approach to songwriting and lo-fi sound palette lend oddkin the tone and feel of a form of audio travelogue, an ever-shifting and evolving record of her passage through constantly evolving environments and spaces.
This is also reflected in Organs Named They Like You’s digital landscapes, which combine organic and inorganic elements, with alien structures rupturing sun-lit fields, placid lakes and sparse rocky outcrops. Mapping accounts of tumultuous emotional landscapes into a virtual space, Kadita and Andersson extend the world of oddkin into a new sphere, rendering computationally the emotional fabric of ioulus’ rich sound worlds.
oddkin is out now, on Rhizome. For more information about Organs Named They Like You and their work, you can follow them on Instagram. You can also find ioulus on Instagram.
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