Mary Ocher

Hello, you're listening to the Audio.com podcast, a place for conversations about sound, art, music and everything in between. I'm Ilia Rogachevski. In each episode, we speak with an artist, musician or sound practitioner and take a deep dive into their life and work. Today's guest is the Berlin-based avant-pop experimental musician Mary Ocher. Ocher has been active in the music scene since the mid-2000s, first fronting the band Mary and the Baby Cheeses and later as a solo artist. She has released six full-length solo albums to date, along with a string of EPs and some bedroom recordings. In 2020, Ocher published a comic book called Loop, which contains biographical strips detailing key moments from her life. It was drawn by 23 international artists and released on Ocher's own Underground Institute platform. Ocher was born in the USSR and raised in Israel, where she says she absorbed the raw currents of xenophobia and nationalism. This life experience has influenced her creative direction, and political themes such as power dynamics, control, authority and the myth of nationhood feature prominently in her work. In November 2023, Ocher released her latest album, Approaching Singularity, Music for the End of Time. It came accompanied with an essay that presents some of the philosophical ideas embedded in her music. The text covers AI, determinism and the nature of identity in a world of accelerating changes that aren't necessarily for the better. It has been my habit with these podcasts to produce profiles that span an artist's career, but for this interview our conversation primarily focuses on Approaching Singularity and the themes surrounding it. If you'd like to know more about Mary and her work, MOOP! is a good place to start. Before we dive in, I'd like to draw your attention to the fact that Mary Ocher is going on tour. It begins in Sweden on the 28th of November and continues through to the beginning of next year, taking in Denmark, Germany, UK and Ireland, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy along the way. For more details, visit the link in the description or go to maryocher.com Ilia: Your new album, Approaching Singularity: Music for the End of Time, was released on the 3rd of November. It's kind of a bleak title. What are the ideas behind this album? Mary: It's really a lot of very, very, very different things and it comes with an essay. The essay is quite long, it's nine pages long, which is a lot to expect from my listeners who may not be readers and readers may not be listeners. So I do realize that, but at the same time I hope that people will still read the essay because I think it's interesting. At least I focused on a lot of very different topics that I think are very relevant and very often people kind of jump to the conclusion that it is about AI and that's very narrow in my opinion because it really isn't. It's about the way that society is changing and adapting to technological developments that maybe are outside of our control and where humanity is heading and a lot of ethical questions. A lot of it is very theoretical. A lot of it is also a little absurd. There's sort of a lot of black humor in it and it's also talking about a lot of ridiculous scenarios that kind of just illustrate our helplessness and our own uncertainty about where things are actually heading. We're clearly in a process right now, but it feels like it's an in-between state. As a society, all of humanity is going somewhere completely unpredictable, which is very exciting and it's terrifying at the same time. 

 I: I was quite interested to read the essay. I wasn't able to finish the whole thing, but there's a shorter like abridged version. 

 M: There's a short version, but it's extremely superficial. 
I just had to somehow summarize everything really fast to make sure that there's enough space in the booklet, but it really doesn't do justice to the full text. 

 I: It comes across very academic, the full version. It has footnotes and lots of tangents. I think it's pretty well structured, but what I mean is that it's almost like reading an academic paper about the state of the world at the moment. M: I'll take it as a compliment because I actually didn't even graduate high school. For me, it's very entertaining to try to tackle these kinds of forms because I feel that I have no permission to do it. I just do it in a pirate way.

 I: This isn't the first time that you've created an essay that coincides with an album release. When did you start thinking that this would be an appropriate format in addition to the music that you're making? M: The very first time was with The West Against the People in 2017. 
That is the third essay and the longest by far. I: Let's just quickly summarize a few of the themes that are on the album and prevalent in the essay as well. There is a bit of AI, ideas of post-humanism, aging, social invisibility that comes with aging, climate change, COVID, our inevitable extinction, surveillance, and this central idea of singularity, which, as I understand it, has a dual meaning. So there's a scientific meaning, the singularity being an infinite value such as the center of a black hole. And then the other meaning is an irreversible change that happens in society as a result of advances in technology that supersede us. I mean, to me, it seems like a very loaded idea to explore within music. The format that you use, there's a lot of experimentation, but essentially it's popular music, it's pop music. So why choose this particular format to express yourself when you're concerned with such big ideas? 

 M: I come from pop music. So for me, that is the essential form that's familiar and that I can really say fully that I have control over. That's something that I know how to do. 
Ironically, though, I don't think that there's a single pop song on this record. Maybe with the exception of “Love is Not a Place”, but even that one has the vocals that are really in the back and the production really fucks up with how you would expect a pop song to sound. 
So I think we're doing every possible effort to reach a very narrow audience by making things difficult to access. But I like the limitations. I like the challenge and trying to find new ways to communicate beyond the form. So yes, you would have the expectation of what a pop song is supposed to be and what a pop musician is supposed to be, and that's extremely boring to me. So I still play with these formats, but try to, at the same time, communicate messages that are beyond the limitations and try to do things in a different way, or many different ways. 

 I: It's actually a very diverse album musically. So the first track is a field recording, which is the Ghent Music School, like a little walkthrough, and then ends up with a choir banging techno track, which is “The Whip”. 
Was it a sort of conscious decision to be so dynamic in terms of your expression, or were you just sort of recording things, and once you had some work, some songs, over a period of time, you're kind of looking back on it and you're thinking all of this kind of thematically goes together? 

 M: It's a lot of fun for me to curate an album. It's also quite challenging. 
There was an enormous amount of pieces, I think over 40 pieces to choose from, and I essentially divided it into two separate albums, because the idea of making one double album was absolutely insane, and I also understand why not a lot of people do it these days. So there's another album, and then there's lots of b-sides, there's lots of remixes, and there's yet other recordings that were made afterwards. 
So yes, I didn't accidentally choose those songs. I really spent a lot of time picking which songs should be on this album and which just don't belong. So I chose them based on a theme. I tried to find something that they have in common, some kind of narrative that I could weave through it, and I already had notes, all these notes that I've been compiling for three, four years, which turned into this essay. It just grew larger and longer and more complicated, so I had to find a form that made sense. I had to kind of remove things that were too repetitive or irrelevant. 

 I: There's quite a lot of collaborations on there as well. There's the group Your Government, which you perform with quite a bit. So as I understand it, it's a percussion duo. Is it Mats Folkesson and Theo Taylor? 

 M: Well, it's actually not quite an independent band. They don't really exist as a band, per se. It's more kind of like a backing band, even though I don't like to call it that. It sounds very limiting, but it's basically two drummers that I play with. We had several lineups since 2012. I think Theo and Mats have been playing the longest, but unfortunately Theo moved back to New Zealand during the pandemic, so the next shows with Your Government will be with Mats and probably our buddy Julian, which I'm really happy to be playing with, but sometimes the lineup changes. 

 I: You've also played with Barry Burns of Mogwai, Red Axes, I hope I'm pronouncing this right, Roberto Cacciapaglia and Le Trucs. 
Are these people that you are working with regularly? Are these first-time collaborations? 
What are the stories behind the works that you made together? 

 M: Basically, I just reached out to various people whose work I like and that I knew and wanted to see what could come out of it. I know Les Trucs for many, many years. We played a few shows together. They're also in the Underground Institute, so basically we just kind of sent back and forth some samples, or they sent me samples and I incorporated them into songs. 
 Barry from Mogwai sent an instrumental that I also just put lots of layers on and turned it into what that song turned into. And Roberto sent a piano melody, which I was hoping we could actually do in person. I thought maybe we could actually meet because we were recording in the north of Italy, not far from Milano, where he is based, where he has a studio. But unfortunately, we couldn't meet in person because it was still a little complicated to organize, so we actually sent these tracks by email and just kept kind of working for a few days. 
 And the last collaboration with Red Axis was in Tel Aviv. I went to their studio, recorded this piece, and then they chopped it around and did some more editing, and this was the result. And there will be the full version, because we had to make a shorter album version, but the full version of this track will be released on December 1st. 

 I: With a video? 

 M: No video. ( :) )

 I: I was hoping there'd be a nice link into my next question about videos, but never mind. But you have released already a few videos for some of the songs on the record. 
The first one was “Zone”, the collaboration with Barry Burns, and I got a very sort of Stalker / Tarkovsky influence there. Is that a correct assumption? 

 M: Um, yes. Even though that wasn't what we were initially going for, but it kind of just happened. I think we instantly recognized it and we were like, okay, we acknowledge this. We will mention this. There was definitely a feeling that we are in an eerie environment where we have lack of control. There's some sense of danger, I guess, or mystery. I mean, we quote it a little bit further in the little description. I think in the original one, the characters are in an environment where a lot of physics don't apply, so that was a really nice abstract concept. 
 I obviously came from the direction of a child and a parent in war, possibly escaping. It's a little bit unclear. We also kind of wanted to convey this vague message that possibly the child isn't real. There's also this element of Alice in Wonderland, of chasing this an ambiguous, kind of like an ambiguous character that may or may not be there. Could it be someone's imagination? 
There were other ideas that we tried to film, but they didn't really end up in the final version. 
We actually shot on several days and several locations and ended up only using the footage from the forest. 

 I: It also ties in with the album artwork, because you're wearing the same coat and on the album, just to describe to our listeners, you're kind of walking through or about to walk through a portal, maybe an Alice in Wonderland type of liminal space, rabbit hole or whatever it may be. It feels like you put on the album, you watch Mary go down through this portal and she appears in this forested area and then you sort of follow that spectre down to the rest of the narrative themes on the album. I thought it was quite a nice way to tie things together and it feels like concept albums aren't very common these days anymore. At least I've not come across very many that feel so well structured or are kind of fun as well to explore. 

 M: Thank you. 

 I: I also wanted to ask about a couple of other videos. The one that came out today is called “Post Everything”, which is a lot simpler, I think, in its structure, but it's basically, as far as I understand it, you've lined up different objects that represent you, everything from books and albums to bike lights. Was there kind of a central idea behind this? Are these objects, sort of artefacts, that you leave behind post-extinction, after death, or is there something else involved? 

 M: I didn't really have to come up with a promotional text for this one, so I think that I didn't really try to analyse it and describe it in this way, but it's quite open to interpretation. There was also a version of this video which had a ghostly layer, which we ended up not using because it just made everything very blurry, but it also had this feeling that this could indeed be something from the past, maybe something that is no more. Although I have to admit that that sounds a bit grim. I actually kind of prefer the idea that these are representations that are not necessarily gone, but are just constant reminders, maybe, of the culture. Kind of just all these things that sort of make you who you are. And so these are the things that make me who I am, I guess, and maybe influence the music as well, to illustrate it a little bit and give a bit more context. So, yeah, there's a lot of records that I like, a lot of records by people who I like and friends and, you know, my collaborators. There was also a reference in the description to a track by Tomita. He had a track called “A World of Different Dimensions”, I think that is the title, which is a piece that I really, really like. It's like an ambient, very, very spacey piece, and I think that that kind of described this strange kind of feeling. Also, another idea was to try to visualize what it could look like to imagine the dimensions that we can't actually physically see, because we're limited in our perception. So the video is kind of trying to illustrate what a different dimension could look like, which we can't physically experience ourselves with our senses. 

 I: When you were talking about the objects that represent you, it made me think about portraiture and, in particular, medieval or Renaissance paintings, where you would have a portrait of a saint and their attribute, and the attribute would be like St. Peter, it's a key, I think. So you could always recognize that it's St. Peter because he has this object on him. 
You can always recognize that it's Mary Ocher because she's got an album of “Big Science” by Laurie Anderson. 

 M: Yes, actually, you know what, I wonder if the whole concept of the next album should change and I should just have a picture of me holding a record that I like. 

I: My last video on the list is “Is Life Possible?”, which I thought was really entertaining. 
So there are these two characters, these two skaters that come across a VHS copy of “Independence Day”, and the video is set in 1997, so this makes perfect sense. And then they go home and they watch it, and it's actually a video from 2020. They see the future unfold over the next 20 years, and you see Trump becoming president, you see COVID, the results of George Floyd's killing, and Black Lives Matter protests and things like that. 
Can you talk about the ideas behind this video and song? 

 M: We tried to illustrate our perception of the validity of different people based on where they come from. The title was borrowed from Judith Butler, which wasn't exactly put in the same way. It's not a direct quote, it's a reference. And the broad question is whether all lives are perceived equally, and I guess that the suggested answer is that they're not. At least not in all parts of the world, not in front of the law. And then again, I feel like science fiction is just a very playful form to actually try to say something serious. So I've been using a lot of science fiction themes to try to actually say something about society. And I came up with the idea of this terrifying future unfolding within the past quite some time ago, and I think it just worked with that particular song. Or maybe that song gave me the idea that we could use this narrative. And then we used an old mini DV camera that luckily I still had. So we filmed analog, and then the big challenge was to convert it into digital so we can edit it. I: At the beginning of our conversation, you talked a little bit about AI, and it's a reoccurring theme in the album. One of the tracks is called “Sonic Departures” and is dedicated to Delia Derbyshire, and it's composed of sort of ambient electronic sounds and your voiceover. 
I read in another interview that you said there is no AI generated music on the album, but your voiceover sounds as if you're reading prompts to create a specific type of music, and then the music changes more or less in response to what you're saying. So is this kind of a comment on AI?

 M: That's a really interesting interpretation, which I really like. And I really like when people find little new things in the music that were not intentional. This was not intentional. And I think that there's a lot of possibilities to imagine something, and it could make perfect sense, but it was not necessarily planned that way. I do like conceptual art. Sometimes it can be extremely pretentious and could mean absolutely nothing at all, but I also liked the idea of having instructions for a piece that isn't necessarily created, but you only have the instructions. And then you, as a listener, have to imagine the rest. 

 I: A bit like Yoko Ono's conceptual work, where she would print a couple of sentences on a piece of paper, and the work is realized by you reading those words back and imagining what the piece would be like, rather than actually acting out the piece, which I guess would be another dimension to the work. 

 M: You know what, I think that even some John Cage pieces are pretty much that. Like, “4.33” is actually an imagined piece. That's what it is. It's not the performance of it, but it's sort of the imagined performance, which is shared by the performer and the audience, which I think is extremely pretentious, if I have to be absolutely honest, but also very bold. 

 I: It is kind of monolithic, isn't it, within the experimental music community? 

 M: Many years ago, I was commissioned among, I think, maybe seven or eight other artists who were all supposed to do “4.33”, one after another, which, again, was extremely pretentious and extremely bold. And I'm kind of ashamed to say that I think that my interpretation was not particularly good. 

 I: Why do you say that? 

 M: Because I think that there's a lot of irony in that piece, or maybe I just don't respect it enough. 
I just somehow thought that is like a big deception that somehow everybody just chose to accept. And also because of the pathos that this piece has, because of its history, because of the way that people perceive it. I mean, it has its place, and so I think that there's something ridiculous about it at the same time. When you do an entire night dedicated to that piece, and you have many different performers side by side, it just gets a little bit absurd. Needless to say, the people who organized it, whom I respect, never invited me to any future events. I think I made this comment, I said that this is the first time I get paid to not play any music.
 I: You have some AI-generated photographs that come as part of the album artwork by Boris Eldagsen, who is a photographer who uses AI prompts to generate AI images. And he won the Sony World Photography Award with an AI image, and there was a big scandal about it early in the year. And I thought that story was very interesting and captivating conceptually. 
Was it that story that made you want to work together, or had you known each other before? How did you end up collaborating? 

 M: Actually, I mean, this was quite a coincidence. I've collaborated with Boris a few times before on photos and photography, he took photos of me. We had some images in 2017, and then we did more photos about a couple of years ago, some of which have been used as promotional images for this album. They were not intended to be part of the artwork, they were just promotional images. But then I tried to come up with ideas for the actual artwork, for the booklet, and the back cover, I had the front cover, but I wasn't particularly sure what the rest of the imagery should be like. 
I realized that Boris's recent work actually, both conceptually and graphically, represented a lot of the same ideas that this album was already dealing with. So I actually just approached him, and I was like, hey, how would you feel if I use some of your images with this album? And I was very glad to see that he was excited about it, and I think he's also pretty happy with the result. 
 I: Yeah, I think they're really powerful. Especially when you can spot the mistakes, you know, the lady with the netting on her face, and you can see the net sort of blending in with her eyebrow or something. It's not immediately obvious that it's AI-generated, but disconcerting nonetheless.
 
 M: Exactly. I find his work excellent, and I'm really, really glad to see that he's actually getting more and more attention from the press, that now it's becoming really big. 
 I: Yeah. Considering how musically varied the tracks on this album are, you're taking it on the road. How are you translating the recordings to a live setting? 

 M: Well, first of all, I use a lot of very different instruments. My rider is very complicated, which is probably annoying to some promoters. And then the collaborations are not performed live, because they're really just studio versions, and I leave them at that, because I think it will not do them justice if I just use a pre-recorded track. I don't use any pre-recorded tracks for many years. I mean, who knows, in the future maybe I'll change my mind, but I really try to avoid that. I don't use any computers, so the set is basically entirely live. 

 I: Reflecting on your background a little bit, and how you got to the point that you are in now, what got you interested in exploring ideas of control and authoritarianism in your art? 
You were born in the USSR, you grew up in Israel, you're now based in Berlin. That's not to say that your background should be the only thing that inspires how you channel your creativity, but I was just interested, because it is something that is mentioned in your biography on your website. 

 M: Maybe it's a little bit dull, but my background influences significantly the themes that I usually write about. My reoccurring theme is power dynamics. I write about abuse of power, I write about militarism, nationalism. In this particular album I talk a lot about determinism, which is something that I've experienced secondhand, watching my parents, who lived most of their lives in Soviet Russia. We left Moscow in the middle of the Perestroika, so this was when I was four years old. 
 I think it's maybe an extension of my personal rebellion, because I felt a lot of resentment for these limitations that my parents, for instance, just took for granted. They just had a certain paranoia in them, and a mistrust, a feeling of helplessness. They felt that you can't really change things, so you might as well accept them as they are, and adjust yourself accordingly. 
Definitely from a relatively young age, I felt a lot of antagonism towards that. I think my way of rebelling is writing about it. When I was a very small child, I would write about world peace, because that was what I thought was important. Strangely enough, I guess in a broad sense, I still write about peace, but in a very different way. Maybe these are traumas that I never got over, or I don't exactly know how to get over, so my way of dealing with them is writing about them.