Part 1

Name: Oo KiDo
Nationality: French
Occupation: Producer, audiovisual artist
Current release: Oo KiDo's new single “Chorus” is out now. It is part of a larger scale work called Odyssey and spread out across several releases.

If you enjoyed this Oo KiDo  interview and would like to stay up to date with his music, visit his official homepage. He is also on Instagram, bandcamp, and Soundcloud. 



Almost all sound artists work with video or visual elements in their presentation in some form. For you, however, that connection seems to be very close indeed. What were some important experiences or works of other artists which lead you towards this integral way of thinking about different forms of media?

Before I started composing music, photography was my great passion. I have kept that with me. A camera taught me to look differently. I have a deep relationship with image, with aesthetics, with beauty in all its forms - like an endless quest. I have also always been more receptive to the evocative power of abstract painting than to images that explain too much.

I became aware of the cinematic potential of my music along the way. The music and its concept were already complete - I had many images in mind, but not yet the intention to offer a full visual immersion. That came afterwards, and I later summed it up in a simple phrase: Listen. See. Feel.

Odyssey was composed outside of any trend or particular destination. It was simply a space of free expression. The project grew progressively, as I began to understand more clearly what I wanted to offer, and what I was capable of offering.

The single edits are being released throughout 2026. In January 2027, the album will come out with the eight tracks in their original, full form - as they were first composed, not in the shortened single versions.

For a long time, I had no real “video clip culture”, as if music had always been enough in itself. Sound was the only support I needed. My interest in the visual side emerged more recently, when I discovered and was amazed by the work of videographer Thomas Blanchard, and later collaborated with him on my first video, “Lifetime.”

He had just worked with Max Cooper, and through that I discovered the McGloughlin brothers - a real revelation for me.

[Read our Max Cooper interview]

I experience a particular form of synaesthesia and when I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. From immersing myself in your work, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the phenomenon in as far as you “have” it, too, and whether your work deals with it in some way.

Ah, the mystery of the senses.

One could bring everything back to a single idea: everything is frequency. The way I experience it is much more a relationship from emotion to emotion. A piece of music can bring back a memory - the way a smell can. It can suggest a story, a physical sensation, a state of mind, a future projection, a person. It can also make images appear, or a texture, a dynamic, a fleeting thought connected to the emotion the music gives me. It is not necessarily a shape or a colour.

During the creative process, the artistic direction is almost entirely intuitive. The concept, the dynamic and the emotion of the music naturally dictate the flow, the texture, the symbolism, the intensity of the images, and the rhythm of the editing. Editing works like mixing: it guides the eye toward what matters most in a sequence, as mixing guides the ear in a piece of music.

I am not certain that I experience synaesthesia. I think its manifestations differ from one person to another - according to personality, sensitivity, history, and one’s connection to sound.

As an artist, I work from what I want to achieve, and how, rather than from the sensory origin of each choice.

I grew up in the MTV era and was always drawn in by the combination of image and sound. I felt it remarkable how some video clips made the music so much more powerful, while others – even those applauded for their artful images would reduce it for me. What do you think creates true synergy, and what causes these two layers to conflict?

When MTV arrived, I remember feeling that kind of disappointment when I discovered the videos of Adam Jones, the guitarist of Tool. I am still an absolute fan of their music, but it did not inspire something so dark in me. It was the first time I clearly felt the gap between what the music opened in me and how the associated image could be destabilising - or, at other times, grandiose.

I am convinced that true synergy keeps its share of mystery. It comes from an impulse beyond reflection and the mind. I am talking about the heart, and intuition. It is the talent of a music supervisor to get close to that synergy. It is also, and above all, a matter of artistic choices.

For example, take two films that both want to confront the horror of war: Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola and The Thin Red Line by Terrence Malick. They share a deep philosophical and spiritual reflection, but they approach it from different angles. In Coppola’s film there is a kind of tonal unity between music and image. In Malick’s, the choice is contrast.

Synergy can carry apparent antagonisms and exist even more strongly beyond uniformity - in complementarity, and in assumed choices. Perhaps the secret is to remain faithful to what one is, and to what one wishes to express, without compromise in the creative process.

The search for that magic matters more to me than finding a recipe for it.

Your work is not just about beautiful images, but also has a conceptual backing. Tell me about why you find such a conceptual framework important.

Music, like so much of contemporary culture, is largely treated as a product: a content, a format, a stream to be consumed. But it has not always had that status.

Like painting, theatre or poetry, it was long a place of ritual, of thought, of connection - sometimes even of transformation. An art that was not only meant to entertain, but to open a space of curiosity. The idea is absolutely not to intellectualise music. It is to give it back a certain depth and meaning. So that it is not only an object of consumption, but a passage.

What I am trying to show is often what the eyes cannot see, but that we can feel. That is why I wanted Odyssey to be listened to, watched and felt - and also to evoke and share, symbolically, philosophically and spiritually, questions, understandings and points of view that come from my own personal experiences.

“Lifetime” seems to have been an important milestone in your oeuvre. Tell me a bit about how it came together, please.

“Lifetime” is the opening track of my first album, and my first music video. So yes, the choice was important to me. I wanted to shake things up.

On first listening, it is the most immediate piece of the record - the one that carries you before you start thinking.



Among the eight elements of Odyssey, my relationship to time is the most uncomfortable. It can even make me feel anger. Life moves so fast, and the thought behind the track is simple: we have to bring consciousness to it, and enjoy it while it is here. It echoes something Oscar Wilde wrote: “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”

So musically, I wanted something physical: a massive bass line, tension and release, a kind of revolt mixed with a sense of liberation. Electro, techno and rock energies meeting in the same current.

We cannot master time. We can only inhabit it, feel it. The video plays with that contradiction. The idea was not only to talk about time, but to manipulate it - to slow it, to accelerate it, to make it roll. An outlet. An illusion, for the length of a track.

“Lifetime” is still very closely aligned with club culture. Your latest pieces do have a palpable beat, but the connection becomes more open. Does dance influence your work and if so, in which way?

Dance music has clearly influenced me. I performed as a DJ for years, spent time in Berlin, and followed labels like Innervisions very closely. Stephan Bodzin’s Ten, Justice’s Cross, or Weval’s Half Age left a strong mark on my production. That culture gave me a relationship to the physical power of electronic sound.



[Read our Stephan Bodzin interview]

I naturally kept what spoke to me - the textures, the momentum, the pulse, the tension - and left aside what spoke to me less, like drums mixed very loud or massive drops. "Lifetime" and later "500 Seconds" still carry that club dimension.



At the same time, dance as movement is not at the centre of my work - except when it becomes a way to embody the music. For the video of Lifetime, and during my research on the theme of time, I discovered that without movement, there is no time. So it felt natural to work with a dancer: the track asked for a body, a choreography, not only for a beat.

In the more recent pieces, the beat remains, but it becomes more open. Less a function for the dancefloor, more a current that the listener - and sometimes a body - can enter.

Your most recent audiovisual release “Chorus” deals with the theme of “air”. How did this concretely influence your sonic palette and creative process?

I had summed up the concept of Air for myself in one phrase: Soft as a feather, charged like a storm.

That is the contrast I wanted to inspire. On one side, a caress, a sensation of elevation - and for that, nothing felt more powerful than orchestral music. On the other, something more grounded and adventurous, which electronic textures could bring. That marriage made the most sense.

It was like the pleasure of a child being given a conductor’s baton: the brass section will play this, the cellos will play that … So much fun - and quite a challenge too.

Visually, the theme of Air posed a very concrete problem: how to make visible something that is, by nature, felt rather than seen. I worked with fluid, organic imagery: macro shots of paint and oil transforming into airy currents, glowing particles and ethereal movements, as if the air were taking form and electrifying itself. The images move from almost weightless, feather-like currents to more intense, electrified bursts of colour and matter.

This visual tension mirrors the musical one: the orchestral side as softness, breath and elevation; the electronic side as voltage, density and disruption. The goal was not to illustrate Air literally, but to let it take form - as if the invisible were becoming audible and visible at the same time.

Probably the most important album in my life, Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxygene, also deals with the theme of air. I just had to ask, if that album happened to play a role for you as well and, if so, how your approach to “air” differs, do you feel?

I smiled when I read this question, because Oxygene was the first album I ever bought with my own pocket money.

I have already received comments about a possible filiation between my work and Jean-Michel Jarre’s. I understand why: electronic, instrumental, sometimes oneiric, abundant music that tells a story. It is very flattering. But although his work is remarkable, I do not think I was particularly influenced by it in a direct way.

You have given me the desire to listen to Oxygene again.