"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
โa 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
- nov 16 2024, tweaked the spectro-crane-hint in the 'smile details section (now a tiny vid! with an actual paper crane!) + tweaks elsewhere in 'smile section, and overhauled the thoughts sandbox + a lil thought into there.
- nov 1 2024, added (my mirrorpage of) the ri,se q&a to the neat stuff
- oct 26 2024, merely in the overhead really
older updates
- oct 8 2024, initiating an adjacent heartwarmth section for the 'smile
- sept 10 2024, little adjustments in the thoughts sandbox. also slipped something into the flips-by-oli list
- july 25 2024, renamed thoughts-about-the-meta to thoughts sandbox + added a lil there
- july 15 2024, in oli-news and further refining the cartoon smile feeling
- intentions:
- read thru the two misc cartoon smile rambles ... see if to tweak them
- overhaul the music scratching a similar itch section - bit out of my depth with it
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:
- rogue intruder, soul enhancer (2019)
singles and ep-s:
- 005 / wish we could zone (2014)
- tracer wanz (2016)
- stress junkie / mimetic (2018)
- ribbon bone (silk chaser) with instupendo (2021)
- go oli go! / cartoon smile (2021)
compilation appearances:
- heretic off pan's mono no aware (2017)
- power over death off posh isolation's i could go anywhere but again i go with you (2018)
- puppet off plz make it ruins' locked grooves (2020) - literal locked groove btw!
dj mixes:
- jungle mini mix (2015 oct 13)
- stress agent mix (2017 jan 23) (part of Radar Radio: Infinite Machine 11, i think)
- W - I HQ #1 - Oli XL & Celyn June (2017 feb 26)
- W - I HQ #2 - Oli XL (2017 apr 30)
- W - I HQ #2 - Oli XL & Renick Bell (2017 jul 30)
- Oli XL B2b Ingrate (2018 sep 29)
- Rinse FM Show #1 (2018 oct 29)
- 24th November 2018 (Rinse FM Show #2)
- Oli XL with Ingrate - 24th January 2019 (Rinse FM Show #3)
- Oli XL with DJ Lostboi - 24th March 2019 (Rinse FM Show #4)
- Kontainer w/ Oli XL @ The Lot Radio (Oli in the last 30 min or so) (2019 mar 29)
- 26th May 2019 (Rinse FM Show #5)
- Lily Mix (on NTS) (2019 sep 27)
- Headspace with Oli XL, Malibu, Lyo & Steff (2019 oct 04)
- Oli XL b2b Minor Science (2020 feb 08)
- Lily Mix II (on NTS) (2020 feb 24)
- Lily Mix III (feat. Samuelspaniel) (2020 apr 20)
- Oli XL - 10th August 2020 (on NTS)
- set for lavapalooza cue stage (2020 aug 15)
- XLR8R & SHAPE - Oli XL, Presented by Insomnia (2020 nov 26) (tracklist)
- Bottega Radio w/ Vegyn & Oli XL (2022 oct 28)
references:
- [1] oli cover story for crack mag (june 2020)
- [2] an interview for subbacultcha (dec 2018)
- oli's soundcloud
- bloom bandcamp
- etc i guess
freshest happenings in oli-music-world
last edited: july 15 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.
- [jul 15 '24] a friend clocked a slight leak of some in-progress album-folder a few weeks back - oli was Not happy about that when i told him, turns out it was a folder he'd sent to some1 at warp last year ๐??? (either the some1 caught so very lackin or it got out thru some security bullshit. who knows! not me)
- [may 26 '24] oh lawd he teasin' on insta. is it over for me if i enjoy even his raw unfiltered singing (which i do)?
- [apr 15] i heard the samples for the album been taking ages to be cleared, i got to talk to oli a bit in end of march after his helsinki set so i asked about that and he said it's only one of the things going on. didn't bother to press on cos i'm intensely patient, but, who fuckin knows.
so we all endure the great lick the lens wait, but: - [may 13] new iglooghost album (tidal memory exo) dropped on may 10 :-D flux cocoon features oli, with additional production and vocals.
- [mar 5] been pretty silent right now, aside from the occasional dj set. who knows! [may 13: still been this way. we love a slow-working legend, hope he's doin good]
- [jan 8 '24] the other day he teased a lil bit of some music in his instagram story. altho just a 10sec snippet. sounded very oli, couldntve been anything else. too early in the year yet for any big advancements tho i guess, but i rly liked the snip...
- a couple of new tunes from ouri dropped on nov 30th '23, blueprints of us has some production touches from oli (i did stumble upon some articlething about it prior to oli having posted abt this in his story a couple weeks later, when i was sort of googling)
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
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):
- the stranger by todd edwards - realized embarrassingly long of a while after first hearin this that it may be oli remix; e.g. in this set (4:43 onward)
- see birds (moon) by balam acab - this is one i saw in the aforementioned playlist with such indication (bonus: he tends to transition this into fonction naturelle by ouri which is a gorgeous fit)
- is it good to you acapella by tammy lucas - confirmed. scratches some itch in my brain so good... sad i haven't got a full recording of it, tho he always transitions this into a remix of flex by dizzee rascal (but oli pls put this into radio-form lily mix 4 i DARE you)
- one heart by kaskade - confirmed. a friend has caught a few of his sets i wasn't at in graceful iphone audio recording and this was in one of em, though by now i've also heard it in a set and he said at the set it's his remix :-D
(shhhh i got a shared folder of oli mixes and sets (helsinki recording mine tho), the kaskade remix is 51:10 of the nov 2023 london nm one)
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:
- cartoon smile (rxbinVR remix) - fun more dancy take on it i love that
- cygnostik N.L.M.B. blend [quit life > oli xl > rx papi ] by sleepworld1
- go oli go! (go tama go! mix) (youtube link cos it's titled more clearly there, the sc upload indicates it in the desc tho)
- ribbon bone (my childhood doodles remix) - by the same person that did the go tama go mix. very cute
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)
โa friend of mine about this, in feb 2024
cartoon smile?
got lots of thoughts about cartoon smile! :')
thoughts sandbox
last edited: nov 16 2024 (removed the subheadings fuck it. pure sandboxing)
(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. (well, not so much purposefully ignoring as just allocating mental energy for other leisurely mental processes i feel more at home with really)
more strength in (fan-)community...
(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.
(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.
music that might scratch a similar itch
last edited: possibly dec 15 2023 (tweaked title italicizing on jan 8 2024)
in a parallel universe this would be a public rateyourmusic list but this isnt the universe. if u find urself here take it as A Compliment.
recos from friends, with what they have said:
- 4096 dub by jamm the sixx hold.
"Tacit recommendation for Oli-fans, e.g., you: (link) / Not exactly the same, but has some of the dubby percussive feel that Oli's music has. And it's from 2015! It still feels super modern." - relacional by mucho sueรฑo
"last part of the song "relacional" on this single/ep (?) reminded me of oli a bit" - bacon boy by europa
"(pinging me with a link to the first track) this is fire / Oli'd Up." - bittersweet by cedric madden, though not a direct reco
"bittersweet was so nice / v oli xl in a way"
miscellany:
- pxe by ecco2k has some tinge of oli inspo to it
- iglooghost for instance has intricacies going on in his sound design n shit that make him Very Eligible For This List
- a friend has said that oli is like millennial/gen-z aphex twin (i forget which one they exactly said, but more likely zoomer) - i can see it lol
- when i once shared a friend's snippet vid from when he saw sophie (r.i.p ๐ฅ) live (of ponyboy) w another friend they thought it was new oli LMAOOOOO but reckon some sophie and adjacent would scratch similar itches for sure. mentally filing some arca into here too (have had a couple ppl mention stretch 2 and xen in particular to me as adjacent-feeling).
- i guess worth it to look into some of oli's inspos too (though i personally get a bit shy about it some of the time haha). basement jaxx been a frequent mention, etc. hes got some list on his spotify artistprofile, with i suppose some fav tunes or tunes he'd like to show (u listen, it's titled)
- etc i need to sit down and think about it more
miscellaneous neat stuff
last edited: nov 1 2024 (addition)
to-do: add more neat shit
- the cover story for crack mag, though one time i stumbled upon the interviewer's tweet about it which went like, "i talked to oli xl about (x, y, z). he didn't really want to be interviewed." ๐ญ yeah relate. but still i enjoy the read.
- wip shots of covers for the above-implied crack mag issue. funny to see the textureless renders, but the pic at the end with oli's face-rendered-in-3d with the doodles on his face is cool - makes him resemble the lil mascotfella for his bloom label a bit
- the go oli go teaser snippet from aug 2020! it's like an impromptu music video!
- theres this cool pic from oli's debut rogue int live set (in 2019) in this resident advisor feature. i love the longsleeve, with the star pattern. it's hot.
- he did a q&a on twitter about rogue intruder soul enhancer a little after it dropped... it's pretty cool too. mirrored the q&a here.
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
- particularly part 5 of 5 star crest by bladee and ecco2k - something very sweet about it in a lowkey way... 'i love you (to eat, to kiss, to love)' etc etc. made me cry a bunch every time across the first dozen or so listens once it really hit me, made me feel so loved
- life after life by ecco2k had really significant situational resonance for me around late 2021 when i somehow only then discovered it. i was in a bit of a transitional time period at the time, so the song really hit at the time
- a friend, in this mix, surrounded cartoon smile so cutely on both sides, from 18:30 onward... blanketed in snow a place returned by cfcf before it, and ๅๅไธญใฎๆ้ๅฒ (morning schedule) by ๆๆใฎใใใใใ (how to count planets) after it, can't even tell what's being sung + found reallyyy few lyrics online, but still it sounds so sweet
- back when i was a hugeass fan of mะพa pillar (russian electronic guy), i would rinse the fuck out of nature theme 2, though maybe that one's heartwarmth was highly situational! but nonetheless counts as paving the way, it's admittedly a rather cozy tune.
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
- the possible cute juxtaposition of the slight vinyl crackle sounds thruout and the fireworks in the outro - tiny crackle, big crackle, everything inbetween.
- the lil guitarloop plucks bein cutely more obvious in parts (would be intensely cute if recorded by oli himself - have heard him say the album's gonna have a bunch of guitar)
- the xylophone type thing of the main part having bit more of a twang to it after the vocal part :')
- the spectrogram from 0:30 onward throws some shapes that come across pretty paper-crane-like to me (cos some of the line continuations are subtler) like I CANT EVEN MAKE THIS SHIT UP look (via foobar2000, right channel, log scale, yes 5x slower tempo)
can't see it? i'll slide an actual paper crane in
(231kb)
i cried a bit the first time i noticed it - for me both paper cranes and this song have come to stand for sweet connections, respectively by way of tending to give them to other ppl, to cute reactions sometimes, and by way of associations of the song to sweet moments, so this coincidental proverbial gesture of this song "giving" a fucking crane to me thru me noticing the shape similarity is... yeah. first time i've cried at the fucking spectrogram of a song lol - in general everything feels very beautifully layered/arranged in it, and even alive in a sense, especially the vocal part. the ebbs n flows, really.
- and the end-sigh :') adds a little more to the aliveness
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: may 06 2024 (slight adjustments), july 25 2024 (shhhh)
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 discord server (thankfully?? for now?? ๐))
kind of unrelatedly, parts of my fanbeing (and life in general) sometimes feel kind of like this meme:
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 ๐คฃ
"ok sneek ive had enough of beholding" - feel free to close the section
"wait no i want to see more" i got good news for u
enjoy being looked at:
or if i may embarrass myself a bit more
from an insta post of oli's from late may 2024...
They're Right, Look
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 and fragile not to express this appreciation i guess!!!