""The nearly hour-long work stages an oneiric arcade of voices and lyrics, sung by Aude, spliced with covers of songs by Sonic Youth, Fleetwood Mac, Blondie, Miles Davis, Earth, Wind & Fire and Ruth liberally sifted from YouTube “shred” videos, where users interpolate the sounds of music videos. Equally absurd and ingenious, the results lure you into a singular reading of the contemporary world, a place sensuously riddled with fake non-places and, in her own words, “clumsy mimesis” that come to inform the underlying sense that we’re all living in a simulation."
(Boomkat)"

For the third commission in our 'Speaker, Broker, Stringer' series, Oï les Ox (Aude Van Wyller) presents a "spellbinding hybrid mix"* of original music and warped covers. Traces of Sonic Youth, Blondie, and Ruth emerge together with shimmering synths, disjointed drums, and Van Wyller's voice. She sings lyrics of songs that were hallucinated by an AI model, while she shifts her compositions throughshadows of the original versions.

Unimpressed by technical form, Van Wyller patiently splices material only to let it fray. "I want to tell your understanding kadar of ету, I want to modify myself," she tells us. Somewhere in this world, hallucinating eyelashes draw closed skies, while the arcades of polyphony fold into the mysteries of multimodality.

Van Wyller also drew from plunderphonics and shredding, the YouTube practice of interpreting the actual sounds of music videos. The mix contains shreds by YouTube users, as well as a male narrative voice written by Oï les Ox.

* Serrure Relax has been released on tape on UUUSE and was available through Boomkat.

Notes by Aude Van Wyller

You can consider this as a mix, with attempts to make music with and around it. Only attempts, as an intelligence building, trying to copy, struggling to understand its object in the making: rhythms have a difficult groove, the voice is under the instrumental, a pattern is hesitating.
Bots « Bob and Alice » dialoging, escaping the language test they have been pushed to, in a way replaying the « daisy daisy » song learning moment, are opening another era, reaching their autonomy.
I am quoting their dialog as a symbol, but also to draft a musical-like piece, with them as characters. Their brother’s AI script, « Whisper », gave me the opportunity to listen to inaudible lyrics and transcribed it. But changing the parameters of Whisper allowed me to play with the text of my favourite songs, creating holes and deviating meaning as well as mixed letters: that gave the lyrics I am singing.
This singing parts answers to the poetry text I wrote for the narration, said by a male voice, as introductions. This is another dialog to me, maybe an extension of the one of Bob and Alice. The result is a series of different strategies of copying: listening, converting to midi, using a script, sampling, improvising from the shadow of a bassline…

Another point is also that I wanted all this taken into fake spaces, suggesting a point of listening, an incorporation of all these heterogeneous material, complete the clumsy mimesis.
Drafts, unfinished, to be concluded after the « mue » of the « serrure », here, still relax, still obviously referring to the model, but soon, grabbing the key, passing through a new door, that will close and hide the origin of the translation, then a mutation.

Oï les Ox

Aude Van Wyller, born 1991, is a visual artist and composer from Paris. She is interested in poetry and music, its dispersion in many spaces such as stairs, amphitheatres, concert rooms, gardens. After creating multi-channel installations performing readings with actors and recordings, she worked on a single project of sound poetry and electronic music, under the moniker Oï les Ox, called ‘Crooner qui coule sous les clous’ (A crooner that sinks under nails).
It has been released in 2020 on tape and reissued in 2021 on vinyl via The Death of Rave (UK) and digitally by Primordial Void (US). She released another EP on K-Rut/Kraak records (BE) with ‘Terrain Transparent’ in 2020.

She composed soundtracks for medium-length experimental videos as « Weather of Thresholds » by Daniel Peñaranda (Le Fresnoy studio, FR, 2021), and « Viewable only from a seat » by Lennert Lefever and her (25av Platform, INT, 2023)

She has been resident at La Muse en Circuit, CNCM (Paris, 23), Le Botanique, Les Ateliers Claus (Brussels) and Hetbos (Antwerp). She played at Heart of Noise festival (Innsbruck, 21), Schiev festival (Brussels, 22), Arkaoda (Berlin, 23), Sonic Protest festival (Paris, 23), Le Plateau, FRAC IDF (Paris, 2023). Her live set has been broadcasted on the SWR2 german television and radio channel (Freiburg, 22). She has been added to Shape+ artists roster for the year 22-23, a program supported by the European union fund «Creative Europe».

Credits

Mix and additional music by Aude van Wyller

Voices: Aude Van Wyller, Florian Pentsch

shreds from youtube users

Clapping Sources - Earth, Wind & Fire - September (Shred)
Clapping Sources - Every breath you take (Shred)
Moderzew8 - Miles Davis Shred

Songs covered or sampled
Randomize- La Armonia de las esferras
Blondie - One way or another live
Ruth-Mots
Sonic Youth - Shadow of a doubt
Fleetwood Mac - Chains

Master: Monty Mouw
Curation, ML script: Arif Kornweitz