"it's oli xl now!"*

an excuse to leave my friends' dm-s alone more of the time and infodump or thoughtdump about oli xl the swedish experimental electronic music dude into here at length instead

i enjoy thinking of this page as a sprawl of notebook papers really!
contents shift, as i occasionally reword or add (or remove!?) stuff.

If I could one day feel even a fraction of the joy sneek feels about oli, I would feel like sunshine

โ€”a friend of mine in oct 2024 .. :,)

*first time i caught oli dj, mechatok uttered that at the very start

i'd got to meet oli for the first time and give him the little headgeared paper crane a few mins prior :-) video is 2.6mb. mechatok is the one w the cap.

caution: flashing lights

newest (substantial) updates

older updates

a preface, for the unaware lot

last edited: july 25 2024 (mirrored and linked the subbacultcha interview)
to-do: alt-text the photos in that mirror

oli xl just some guy with a small discog that ive really been enjoying since 2021, after a friend i know of basically thru bonding over iglooghost recommended me rogue intruder that april off of me enjoying ecco2k and his pxe ep, and whose music etc my brain has been cartwheeling a lot over since like february 2022...

a chopped and adjusted ver of a wikiarticle-like thing i cooked up originally in year0001's index wiki in end of oct 2023

general

oli xl (b. march 3 1995) is an experimental electronic music artist and dj from stockholm, sweden. he has been releasing music since 2014, under his own labels w - i and bloom, and is currently signed to warp records since 2021, with his much-anticipated sophomore album on the way.

career

he was put onto music production at a young age by an uncle of his [1] and has been releasing music under the oli xl moniker โ€“ a direct reference to junkie xl by way of the soundtrack to ssx 3, a game oli played a lot growing up [2] โ€“ since 2014. that year saw his oldest intact track titled active uploaded onto his soundcloud, the founding of his label worldwide international, later shortened to w - i, and his debut ep 005 / wish we could zone releasing on the label.

in the years following, he continued work on w - i, releasing music from himself as well as others. he also appeared in pan's highly acclaimed compilation mono no aware (2017) and posh isolation's compilation i could go anywhere but again i go with you (2018).

(on a sidenote, was chastic mess oli too? there's only one ep, and barely any info, besides oli having done the cover art. at this point we will never rlly know and maybe that's the spice of life!)

in 2019, he released rogue intruder, soul enhancer, his debut full-length album, on bloom, after having wound down w - i the year prior [2]. since then, he has largely been working on his yet-upcoming sophomore album lick the lens, to be released on warp records.

in addition to producing, he plays dj sets, having performed at various events throughout the years and releasing dj mixes through, for instance, nts radio (which also saw his lily mix series) and rinse fm.

discog:

albums:

singles and ep-s:

compilation appearances:

dj mixes:

references:

freshest happenings in oli-music-world

last edited: dec 10 2024

a friend of mine has half-jested that i'm like their (main) oli-xl-related news source. imagining me with a 01-moth-helmet style newsboy cap and all. with the wings. so this mildly experimental section is dedicated to that.

some thoughts or whatever about the music

last edited: sept 10 2024 (addtn + adjusts in flips-by-oli section), oct 26 2024 (tiny friend-quote addition)

perhaps the most important part of this really haha
an opportunity to get into my head a bit wrt how or why i tend to enjoy the music

most banger tweet i've seen about oli's music

tweet saying "One of my favourite things about the Oli XL record is all the lil ad libs from the Minecraft villagers.", by Mattie Colquhoun / @xenogothic, from july 29 2019
for context: not literal minecraft villager ad-libs!! it's the little vocalizations of i'd reckon his own, littered across some tracks, that tend to be like 'yeah', 'oh', 'yo', whatnot. and if you want a super clear example listen to go oli go!

and, honestly it's one of mine too. one of the things that breathes life into it, in a sense.

most/least favs

off rogue intruder in specific my personal most favs are hesitate and sniper baby, jet generation too sometimes. least favs seem to be clumsy, liquid love, orchid itch - mostly cos of some highly specific element that tends to sensorily bother me while having nothing against the tracks overall!!
like with liquid love for instance it's the particular lil repeating vocal sample, maybe the same with orchid itch, but with clumsy it's a specific recurring percussive sequence goin on haha - i guess the album to me is like some good friend with a few conflicting sensory needs!

as for the rest i cant be arsed yet to weigh the rest for now cos it's just ep-s and singles for now. except that i barely listen to heretic! but this makes a lot of sense in the context of cartoon smile being my most listened song!

everyday mundaneity companionship

a lot of the music tends to slot into such pretty well for me... partly as mere wallpaper for my mind (the 005 / wish we could zone ep-thing in particular, listened to it a lot on cloudy workmornings in summer 2021), partly as tunes for flow states (have racked up a lot of listens on rogue intruder from such lol, from walks and (sometimes) work in particular, though not as much these days), whatnot.

heck, rogue intruder tends to kick my brain into some sort of Do Things gear, useful sometimes when my executive function's not cooperating with me...

"wtf oli drop the edits"

by way of having caught him dj a bunch of times i've tapped into a fun part of the meta which would be Some Of The Edits He's Played Being His Fuckin Own! on the one hand i fuckin need some of em in studio quality to enjoy em in homelistening circumstances or whatever, but it's fine if he's selfish and keeps em for dj tool purposes! it's pretty easy to clock em in the wild, usually cos of the very oli percussive stuff going on.

(he used to have this playlist public on spotify, allegedly without having been aware it was public til some1 pointed that out to him or smth haha, and there were some local files on there too and did see a couple with oli rmx or lily rmx indication...)

a few particular ones i've quite enjoyed the maybe-oli remixes of (would timestamp em to the footage i got up on the tubes but too lazy at the moment):

some nice remixes of oli out there too

i've been keeping a (for now only soundcloud) playlist of remixes etc of oli's stuff that i've managed to get my hands on. the list merely for documentative purposes really, but i can bring out some personal favs of mine here (and sometime maybe document non-sc ones too)

so, the personal favs, for the time being:

life-affirming warmth, or, about [songtitle reveal pending]

there's this tune he's played across a couple of the sets of his i've caught that's very possibly an unrelease of his own (heard in first min of here; lick the lens spoiler possibly), and i've listened to my minute-long recording of it on loop at times, especially in summer, sometimes for hours.

and i did already do that for like a couple hours the day after the set i first heard it at, as i was sleepy on the bus home... early august 2022, 4pm, warm, sun shining. and maybe the tune has kind of become one of warm sunny naps and warm sunny walks for me. and the second time i heard him play it during a set i smiled so so big the whole of the tune; during that one he played some tunes off lick the lens (his upcoming) alongside other things, i hope this one is on it too :o but excited all the same.

ohhh
i like it
it is cute !
he is producing (plants, fruits, vegetables)

โ€”a friend of mine about this, in feb 2024

cartoon smile?

got lots of thoughts about cartoon smile! :')

thoughts sandbox

last edited: dec 10 2024 - absorbed part of the music scratching a similar itch section into here, small tweaks in a couple others

sneeks contextlessness

for how deep i've drilled into oli's music-realm it feels so silly how little i tend to significantly dwell on his inspos and so on. and how damn little of a deeper clue i tend to have about all that - just surface level awareness really. i do have at least one also-hogwild-for-oli friend who does love to drill deep on the Historical And Musical Contexts Oli Seems To Be Landing Or Have Landed Into(TM) and everything... maybe it's just in my nature to be super narrow with this type of shit!

i love to enjoy things for things' sake, and i love to see people who enjoy things in their wider contexts, and i try not to feel bad about seemingly ignoring that most of the time. (ok, not so much purposefully ignoring as just allocating mental energy for other mental processes i feel less out of my depth with really)

more strength in (fan-)community.

oliesque

ive had friends occasionally rec oli-esque stuff to me or in my general direction, feeling like compiling those

bonus:

go oli go single boomkat blurb

whoever wrote in the boomkat blurb for go oli go single this - "Flipside 'Cartoon Smile' is more restrained, bundling acoustic guitars and theatrical strings into a lysurgic nu-folk package, complete with demonic childish sing-along chants." - is a little silly. demonic???!??!?! but also - "Let's get Oli XL soundtracking some kind of surrealist stop-motion animated movie soon, please? Well good." or animal crossing.

though maybe cartoon smile does have a little bit of sinisterness to it! off-tune guitarloop and that. but the singing...come onnn (ok hand on my heart i know music is so very subjective tho!)

helmet

the pilot helmet he uses a small bunch gets some thoughts percolating in my head too but really i dont knoe why oli has the helmet so! but, something about the guy being swedish, the helmet being soviet russian, my estonian ass lookin at this. some small extra lowkey wildly loaded dimension to all this for me.

and one time sometime 2023, soon after oli had put the ig story about acquiring the helmet (from years back, 2017 or 2018; zsh-3m by the way) into his profile highlights, i was googling around about it a little and stumbled upon some ukrainian's ebay listing about one salvaged as war trophy or something. 'nother crazy extra dimension.

if he ever has a(nother) q&a one day i'd totally ask about why he's got the helmet, alongside way too many other questions locked and loaded in my brain. maybe theres nothing deep and bro just likes to look like a Bug. maybe there is, in which case i'm sooooo nosy.

miscellaneous neat stuff

last edited: nov 1 2024 (addition)
to-do: add more neat shit

cartoon smile...

last edited: oct 08 2024 (nu section), nov 17 2024 (tweaking the spectrogram crane-shape hinting; little tweaks elsewhere)

tl;dr:
thank you, oli โ€”
i mean it.

love this song so much. i have a whole zinelike Thing about it, but sometimes i've wanted to talk about my love for it in more free form, especially in particularly radiant moments... has helped me figure out what about it rly makes my whole being sing.

also the way i've ended up having it (or rather my feelings n experiences with it) inspire what ended up becoming the dark theme on my site, via the zinelike. funniest pipeline of inspiration to me honestly. Feelings Over A Song Influencing A Stylesheet. but also... really sweet.

refining the feeling [2024 jan 30 + jul 15]

a friend brought up a zine idea of theirs a while back that would just be of their friends talking about their favourite songs, and said i could blurb up something for it too, so i carried that thought for a while and then one night in january, when i felt it being particularly radiant, i ended up proceeding thus,

cartoon fucken smile......
ive been pondering for a long while what about this has resonated w me so deeply, but i guess for me its basically become the soundtrack to any n all moments where i feel ive rlly belonged pretty much, been healing my heart in some sense thru that...
so it rlly means the world to me, and also its just such a beautiful lil tune, it already did feel very tender when i first heard it

and writing that down like that made me realize a bit later that it's sort of been hammering some feeling of "hey u belong to the world/earth at large" into me all this time. really hugely healing effect. though i sort of touched upon it in the zinelike, but putting it like this...

and then sometime onward realizing that whenever i'm able to let it even relatively fully resonate with me (surprisingly often still), i feel like i'm home... in some really deeply heartwarming way. more home than i feel in my current physical home. i think i'll let this be the beacon of my really-home-feeling... will see! it just remains really crazy to me, i've never had these types of feelings to this degree with any other song, though some have been close (or paved the way! :-) who knows!).

though i still struggle with simultaneously holding this feeling and all the mess of life, there's a thin line between letting this be the occasional needed balm for my soul and accidental escapism from life as it is (in all its complexity). but the feeling helps me exist and move thru the world a little easier, a little warmer. makes fighting for the betterment of it all a little bit more worth it, i think.

and how it's stuck around with me for a while now - the friend also said 'it's so wild though that you would just make such a thing that stays with a person like that' about this in april 2022, and i thought about it again alongside the aforementioned initial realizing and something about how the uttering was from almost a couple years back made me cry a bit

it really is so wild

adjacent heartwarmth

there's been other songs that might have lowkey paved the way for this song?

currently gonna list them as they come to my mind, really

maybe there's been more, just in more lowkey and/or general ways.

cartoon smile slowed down...

with the pitch unaffected, that is. and little to no reverb. (shoutout to paulstretch tho)

crossposting this journal entry of mine, though feels a bit vulnerable to have it more out in the open like this. hell, i'll even have the initial unabridged-preface one here.

(written on thurs, jan 05 2023, 10pm-11pm)

i just had this insanely emotional moment.

so, i was listening thru rogue intruder soul enhancer by oli xl, but slowed down to like 50% tempo or so, regular slowing not paulstretch-type, pitch unaffected, but with slight reverb atop, through foobar2k (it's neat it has the options to manipulate music like that in realtime). was just sort of getting lost in the sounds, super enjoyable slowed down like this, what with oli's sound having all these intricacies to it.

and from some point onward i was lying down on my bedroom floor as i listened, on top of my blanket all piled up, in this half-fetal pose next to my laptop on its stand.

decided to slow the sound down even further for the album's final song, sniper baby, to like 3x or 4x slower. it's a sorta melancholy but cozy song, that. i felt it crawl deeper into my heart like this, especially with the little crooning... felt really melted into relaxed goo from the sheer slowdown and at the same time full of love for this.

queued cartoon smile by oli up next on a last-second whim. it's well established itself as one of my biggest comfort songs of current, as is clear from my little zineshrine for it, though i'd been feeling it waning a bit into the background, which is fair with songs sometimes of course. but this time...

as i was lying down, in this really really relaxed and a lil bit tenderhearted state, letting the song wash over me in its significantly slowed state... it made me feel like... a little field of flowers somehow, with all its whole tiny little ecosystems within, on a clearish summer morning, or evening, wind rustling through a bit, lit up by the gentle sun. ticking by its own little rhythms.

and i felt really overwhelmed, by this feeling of... oneness with nature or the world, or something. i don't know, i can't really put into words the sheer effect this had on me, but it felt really significant, really special, and unexpected, and it had me crying, from this... simultaneously complex and yet so simple joy, and love.

on this evening, 10pm, with all my lights automatically shut off by then, but outside this dark warmth and safety of my room a cold clear night, moonlit, not directly visible from my window but could clearly see it shining upon surfaces outside. and tomorrow forecasting a sunny day, as was for some of today over a longer while as well.
and me, feeling better than i've been -- throat not sore anymore, only a bit sensitive -- able to enjoy (en-joy...) existing a lil more again.

and other people directly around me, mostly safe in their own little realms, their own little interior cocoons at this time of night... me, safe in mine.

i simply needed to put this tender state into words...
(read as: hi world i <3 you i felt safe to share this with you i'm so glad i can)

and in general listening to it slowed down has made me notice some beautiful things about it. probably most notable observation sound-wise being at 1:19 of the song (almost too drowned out by the rest of the stuff going on the first time around it seems lol), the very subtle vibrato type thing going on. can just about notice it in original tempo too if u listen closely, but slowed down it sounds all the sweeter... so beautiful.
one time while slowed down to half tempo i even echoed the vocal bit over itself, so so lovely like that too... full oli cocoon mode really

but the whole song just hits different like this (though it fortunately still also hits in its intended tempo :'))

other lovely details

in general cant stfu about the song [early march '23]

still blows my little mind a lot how it tends to sometimes make feel so warm inside even after a fuckton of plays (4663 as of writing this), though doesn't include some edge cases (occasionally looping the vocal bit a bunch of times while listening on desktop because desktop scrobbler doesnt go as haywire at that, listening while it's slowed the fuck down, the couple of occasions ive listened to it with the visualizer from my switch lite*)

resonates with my heart way too perfectly in its lil imperfect ways, no fucking idea how oli managed to just sort of, wow. some tunes out there are earcandy - this is ear-hearty-breakfast-meal. so beautifully layered, everything about it. or maybe i am warmly very biased! like, a friend says the vague dissonance, of the guitarloop, tends to break their brain, but i've got warmly used to it haha, fits in the little quilt.

no idea why i still return to it so so much. though, look at the times we are living in, maybe i need some kind of stability, some kind of warm beacon to keep recalibrating my soul to, or something. and maybe the world feels overwhelming sometimes... and cartoon smile feels like a little home.

though i've had other comfort songs throughout my music-enjoying life for sure, there's another track in my last.fm library that's in the 4k+ club, nature theme 2 by moa pillar, but that one i would listen to on repeat one mode a bunch, while i rarely have cartoon smile on repeat one mode (only if i happen to be listening from desktop browser youtube on loop), tend to always manually tap back to it for as long as i'm in the mood, which is kind of crazy considering the playcount lmao

*one night over xmastime 2022 i pulled up the go oli go / cartoon smile thing on youtube on my switch, and listened to the two tracks on loop while drifting in and out of sleep... the doublesingle with the lil visualizerloop of oli walking around some random field had a particularly calming effect on me that night

some extra! [23 oct '23]

count's at 5862 now, and still ever so ridiculously radiant!

i guess at least 80% of the listens might proverbially plop my emotional self in front of some sort of shelves but on the shelves there are all sorts of sweet memories, even if just subconsciously. like, i might end up cryin over something entirely unrelated while listening at times hahaha

and i forget what i've writ in my journal on the site wrt this and what i haven't, but on the day i posted this (for bonus context the nondescript dog was a larger brown poodle-type one i had such a cute time giving em pets), on the last late evening bus back home, as it was pulling into my hometown, i swear i just about saw a couple kids run to the fence of some streetside house and wave at the bus, as i happened to have the song on in my earbuds, i genuinely near bawled lmao the whole combo (of the day, the moment, the tune) touched my heart so deeply n ive sort of ended up carrying that with me quietly

i don't know i sort of just needed to write this down. i kind of want to (privately) write down what moments cartoon smile has accompanied or even at least pinged to in my mind, for if/when my memories start becoming more slippery in the (hopefully much further) future... really does mean a lot, how it's snowballed into something like this

things/thoughts referred to:

1st - jul 18 '23, 12:40am

tweet crosspost

1 comfort tune as well-loved plush (may 27)

2 comfort tune as sponge of sweet memories from even before knowing of said comfort tune + listening to cartoon smile really slowed, randomly thought about how i started enjoying burgers more after my university-time roommate took me to a more proper burger place one year for my bday, started crying even tho perhaps a mundane thing but SO SACREDLY MUNDANE (just earlier)

its overwhelming sometimes but, really sweetly so

2nd - jun 21 '23, 4:56pm

parts of the state of the world may be ugly disgusting despisable etc

but:

today ive eaten some nice strawberries, am going to meet up w at least one friend over an absurdly long while today, and got to pet a really happy-excited dog at work (the owner was rly thankful we let em in w the dog haha cos there apparently been some discourse wrt letting dogs into shops - idc ill let em in as long as thems leashed and i WILL ask if i can pet (unless obv that unfriendly or a service dog))

there was some1 with a wee lil dog the other day at shop and i also asked if i can pet, they said no they Will bite, and i respected that ofc but it was so fuckin funny to see the lil dog all look at me from atop the raised counterfront w the face as if the mf wants pets (Perhaps A Ploy)

[+ 4:57pm] and also heart full from all that n ole trusty companion oli-xl-cartoon-smile.mp3

fanbeing ruminations

last edited: dec 10 2024 (small earnest section)

i tend to get intensely into some music artist or other (one of the manifestations of me being on the spectrum really), it's been like this since late '00s, and especially with the obscuremore favourites it's a vague struggle between expressing my sometimes disproportionate appreciation in a way that feels sufficient to me and not overwhelming ppl including the artists themselves.
the internet can be silly in this regard, what with there sometimes ending up being a legitimate direct line of connection between fan(s) and fave thru some platform or other to some extent (at least oli himself doesnt have any sort of presence on discord (thankfully?? for now?? ๐Ÿ˜‚))

kind of unrelatedly, parts of my fanbeing (and life in general) sometimes feel kind of like this meme:

an illustration of a doglike entity at a mirror, the entity uttering at the mirror "okay, me, we're going to only say NORMAL things today! Normal things!" and the mirror image uttering back "the harder you avoid being weird the more you kill your spirit. normalcy will not save you. post stupid things or die"

can of course be respectful about it! and i try to ofc why would i not? hes just some guy!

at least with oli there's enough of a following that there's fellow fans to bounce the energy off of sometimes which is good... a certain prior huge fave of mine was too obscure to really have that to the same degree - plus most of the fans of that one at least at the time having been russian, a language and realm which i don't feel fluently at home in - so i mostly just raved to my poor poor friends in that fave's case haha
though sometimes in oli's case i still do rave to some friend or other! even if its just about him being cute or whatever, cos lets face it, he's cute, but this is not what this page is about ๐Ÿคฃ

maybe im only this selfconscious at times cos I Know He Knows I Exist, but long as i'm moving with respect etc i reckon i'll be fine in the end... just that life's too fucking short + fragile + absurd not to express this appreciation i guess!! but maybe i'll opt for mostly doing it at the world at large!! hi, world at large!!

if i may be earnest with u for a sec tho

yea sneek u may

yes i will address this part sorta directly to oli.
no i will not tell any of this to his face. yes i may perish a bit if he were to see this.

hi whoever cares to look!!!!

context: june 2022, there was a vague but mildly worrying insta story from oli.

i'm glad you ended up being okay that one time, for real.

the day you posted that, i ended up going outside that evening to try fend off my worry. went to the beach, of the lake. around 9pm, warm, sun was still up. still lively with people, and a small barky dog living nearby. i just sort of hung out on my own for a bit.

at one point i spotted a tiny molting bug had landed on my arm, trying to wriggle its old shell off. i hadn't even noticed it land on me. felt like a sign, i think. he'll be okay.

just wanted to share this, for the time being.

i'm glad you exist and make your little music and let us hear some. some of it has resonated so deeply with me. take care, be safe.
it's highkey stupid as fuck how much love in my (fan)heart i have for you.

pestering judgmental voice at the back of my head muttering something about cringe and me being just a fan why the hell am i saying all this etc etc, but โ€” can't a person care? can't a person be sincere.

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