On the Rise
Ouri

Ouri had grown up learning harp, piano, and cello, and was well on the way to becoming an artist. That journey still clashed, however, with being a “rebellious” kid, and the joy that she found in electronic music. As she got older, Ouri realised that cities in Canada were doing those kinds of genres differently. It’s hard to say otherwise – to this day, places like Toronto and Montreal house thriving dance music scenes, propped up by an alchemical combo of the nation’s lush cultural diversity and DIY approach to making art.

Feeling drawn across the Atlantic, when the chance came to study abroad at just sixteen, Ouri took it – flying out to start a new life in Montreal.

“My cello teacher had a relative in Montreal who was the first real feminist woman that I ever met. And she kind of took me under her wing,” says Ouri. “I was tired of the restraint of classic training. I remember I was listening to Aphex Twin and James Holden under a snowstorm, not dressed at all for like minus thirty degrees Celsius. And I just felt like there was so much space for me to discover who I really wanted to be musically.”

She wasted no time, and got to exploring the Montreal underground, both figuratively and literally: “I remember some new friends taking me into abandoned places and squats. This one time we’re walking to a venue under a bridge and there was a long river underground. And we’re all going towards the DJ and fucking ready to party and the bridge collapsed. It was super scary. But when you realise that no one is harmed, the party is just exploding after that.” There was no stopping her – she was and would continue to be a part of this scene that she was growing to love.

Today, she’s got four EPs, two collaborative records, and one solo album (plus a forthcoming second) under her belt, not to mention a head-spinning variety of musical talents – she sings, writes, DJs, produces, mixes, masters, and plays several instruments. You’d imagine developing that many skills would need a bit of discipline – and you’d be right. For Ouri, however, musical discipline paradoxically comes from an obsession with “freedom.”

“I’m super happy I learned how to do all these things,” she says, “… especially mixing and mastering, because it’s about understanding how far you can own the narrative you want to push. How much you want to own the sound you want to create. Understanding limitations and pushing boundaries. I guess there’s definitely discipline. There’re phases of discipline that I embark on,” she laughs.

Before releasing her debut full length, Frame of a Fauna, in 2021, Ouri had been finding her feet on the Montreal live scene for a long time. A good crash course for her sound is her 2018 Boiler Room set, on YouTube. It was her first live show, but that doesn’t come across while watching – through the half hour show she’s surrounded by a spaceship-like rig of analogue synths, weaving house and IDM beats, which sound like they’ve been retrieved from dreams, wearing an expression of unwavering confidence the whole time. It’s pretty hypnotising.

Fast forward to 2024, the stage and studio have started to blur for Ouri. Much of her new record, Daisy Cutter – her second – was seeded while touring with Toronto’s Charlotte Day Wilson, who features on one of the album’s lead singles: “Behave!”.

“I spent a lot of time working at random hours, and having extreme routines. I would travel, work at airports and hotel rooms, shitty coffee tables, having no space, and having so much space at incredible studios,” says Ouri. “When I’m touring with Charlotte, the rest of the band want to listen to music all the time, on the road, and I need silence, so I put on my headphones. Then I’m like, ‘maybe I can work a bit?’ I also wanted to listen to each song, and every version of each song, in all these environments, to make sure that the feeling I get is unshakeable, you know?”

In his book How Music Works, former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne says that the environments where music is made shape the way that it sounds. You can certainly hear this principle through Daisy Cutter, which evolves with so much motion and variety.

From lo-fi piano textures on tracks like “Friends from Nowhere” (which Ouri tells me was made from moving a “shitty recorder” her boyfriend gave her to different points on her home studio’s piano), to glitchy tech house beats on cuts like “Droplets in The Air”, Ouri expertly balances the album’s acoustic and electronic sides. All the while, her intimate, half-murmured vocals remain a constant throughline.

“I love the idea of an abstracted sound that is perfect and pristine,” she says. “But I also really like the presence of the artist – the grittiness, the breath, the squeaky wood. There’s something about it that anchors it in the present moment.”

Daisy Cutter is also a concept album – of sorts. While making it, Ouri started imagining a secret society, militia, or group of rebels, devising new, boundary-pushing ways to think and to act. For her, this became a good metaphor for making music.

“I was trying to visualise this as much as possible – what would these people make the album sound like? What would they express in the music? What’s their view of love, devotion, sensuality, authenticity, and all this stuff? I feel like when you’re creating, you often have the voices of people you admire and know, in your head, judging what you’re doing. But I created this new ‘jury’ in my head.”

Throughout her career, Ouri has sought to create in ways that people might not expect – whether we’re talking about her kaleidoscopic talents, the way her music flips from R&B-tinged songs, to house and IDM, and back again, or even just the way she approaches live shows. Since the Boiler Room, she’s tried nearly every possible way of performing electronic music, from DJing, to building analogue synthesizer rigs, or just playing her cello and bass guitar through effects boards.

The upcoming shows for Daisy Cutter are going to be equally well thought-out. As we speak, it’s the eve of her jetting off to Mexico, where she’ll play a show with two additional musicians on keys, sax, and guitar.

“I’m super excited about it,” she says. “I’ve tried many things in the last few weeks – I’ve tried playing solo, in hybrid acoustic and electronic settings, and with a band. I also tried a live set that was purely acoustic, skipping the electronic part of the album. I’m obsessed with cello and piano, and it’s such a treat to do this.”

At this point you might notice a pattern – a drive, through Ouri’s career, to resist expectations. In earlier interviews, she’s spoken about how earlier in her career she held back from singing too much, because she wanted to reject the confines of being the ‘female vocalist.’

Nowadays, though, singing is just as integral to Ouri’s sound as the detailed production. There’s a tradition of women in electronic music, like Laurie Anderson and Björk, using their multi-disciplinary talents, encompassing singing, production, instrumentation, and thoughtful songwriting, to push the genre forwards. It’s hard to not place Ouri within that lineage.

“Being mixed race since I was a kid, there were so many questions about my identity that other people don’t ask themselves,” she says. “There’s this quest of wanting to define who I am, and at the same time I feel like identity is nothing. It’s comforting to know who we are, but it's also really exciting to constantly explore who we can be, and get in contact with boundaries, instead of imagining them at a distance.”