About
Composer Olivier Florio's career is oscillating at its own pace between film music and "contemporary" music. This doesn't mean a complex or "difficult" music, but rather an atmospheric and climatic dimension, a music which cannot be confined to a single definition. Hybrid in nature, it transcends genres, often blurring the lines between acoustic and electronic music.
At the beginning of his career, he found an echo in music for films, creating a depth on the screen and gradually going beyond the frame in a kind of return to an autonomous language of music.
In this game of mirrors, Olivier Florio approaches this new dimension of his work from an almost psychoanalytic angle, a bit like the soundtrack of his own inner film, of his own existence and the existential questioning that accompanies it.
A sensibility rather than a style
Anne Valenti - Cadenceinfo.com
Olivier Florio is a jack of all trades. Far from being a lack of focus, his multifaceted career reflects a profound artistic quest: the search for a musical identity that avoids the « stylistic boxes » that the composer associates with a form of artistic confinement. He charts his own course, far removed from overly rigid models. Olivier Florio thus combines, as he pleases, string quartets, electro, sound design, orchestra, piano and any other audio material that may have meaning for him. The result is sensitive music, often tinged with images and in a unique style that has become his trademark.
His sources of inspiration?
They are numerous. Ryuichi Sakamoto, Angelo Badalamenti and Clint Mansell form part of his deep influences, but also Steve Reich, John Cage, Laibach, and Nine Inch Nails. Alongside these influences, what inspires Olivier Florio's music today is the major upheaval in the fields of experimental physics related to consciousness, the philosophical dimension and the resulting renewed point of view on the world.
Music as a portal to consciousness?
Vibration, Information, Energy. This is the new foundation of science for defining reality today. "Young's double-slit experiment and quantum entanglement offer a glimpse of a different vision of reality, an underlying layer," he tells us. Consciousness does not emerge from matter or from the complexity of biological organization. On the contrary, consciousness engenders matter, time, and space, from which biological complexity arises.
Vibration, Information, Energy? All of this is closely related to music. And Olivier Florio draws a thread from it: Sound as a portale to consciousness? "Don't we sometimes have the feeling, when listening to music, of being touched beyond words, beyond the intellect? Precisely because it resonates with the vibration of the world. It resonates with that subtle and vibratory dimension of ourselves that pre-exists our material state of being."
The invisible suddenly becomes audible.
These reflections inspired his latest albums such as KEL or AkashiK.
“Olivier Florio, Conceptual”
Belkacem Bahlouli
Rolling Stone Magazine
Conceptual, not in the 20th-century way of thinking, i.e., music considered from the point of view of the idea prevailing over its materialization but rather in the sense of something that is a choice, a concept.
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All of this takes place within a context. That of the technological world of our era,” says Olivier Florio, "influences from composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, with whom I had the opportunity to talk with about the context of the era, the notion of « art work » that tends to become vague, the information society and even the wastes of technology whose dross sometimes provides material for musical composition or inspiration. All these elements have also had an impact on my work."
Bits of music, a feeling of scatteredness, a discontinuity of reality.
An era marked by an increasing fragmentation of everyday life, fueled by the convergence of urban and digital environments. The modern individual, caught in the whirlwind of the city and the incessant flow of information, oscillates between multiple temporalities and spaces that fracture their experience of reality. Constant stimuli, advertisements, notifications, and noise intertwine. Urban space has become a network of fragmented pathways, where attention is continuously captured and diverted, where individuals move from one place to another without always being able to fully inhabit the moment. Ultimately, this gives rise to a way of life in which stability dissolves in favor of a succession of isolated events.
Digital technology intensifies this dynamic. Hyperconnectivity fragments time into a series of interruptions and constant demands. A conversation is cut short by a message, a thought is derailed by an alert, a moment of silence is suddenly invaded by a continuous stream of digital content. Augmented and virtual realities are also gradually reshaping our lives.
According to Olivier Florio, this imposed ubiquity prevents the unification of lived experience and generates a state of mental dispersion in which concentration becomes a challenge. “We have the feeling of living an experience of time and space that is increasingly fragmented and in total opposition to our inner unity. And that… clearly impacts the temporality of listening.
” Concept albums?
All of this leads us toward the notion of the concept album. “It is, in a way, a response to this fragmented time,” he tells us. Olivier Florio’s albums are designed to be listened to in the continuity of their writing, rather than in a fragmented manner. In contrast to the trend of playlist - a kind of heterogeneous "music pudding" - that characterizes contemporary listening, he devotes a great deal of time to assembling tracks together, sometimes even rewriting certain passages so that the pieces flow seamlessly and intuitively into one another, much like the sequencing of scenes in a film. The aim is to construct a common thread, a guiding idea that shapes the listening experience.
In the album KEL, for example, he speaks of the dust generated by the modern world, industry, pollution, which, according to him, also produces a mental dust that gradually settles over our days, our thoughts, our lives. In AkashiK, he reflects on the vibrational and informational dimension of reality. With each project, a theme seeks to add depth, to provoke reflection and questions.
Creating as a way of questioning the world “
Creating is a way of questioning the world. And when we think of the world as a wave, then playing music becomes a way of communicating—and I would even say communing with that world,” he tells us. For several years now, he has invited listeners to approach music a little differently, not merely as emotion or entertainment, but as a means of exploration, a sensitive inquiry into reality and consciousness. “I like weaving connections between very different musical worlds and grounding it all in these deep, almost philosophical questions—a questioning of our relationship to the world, to technology, to reality.”
But if music can resonate with the vibrations of the world, do we still take the time, in our daily listening, often saturated with more or less standardized sounds, to be attentive to its deeper resonances? What space do we leave for this more exploratory mode of listening? This question runs subtly through Olivier Florio’s work. Like a waves miner, he invites us to attune our ears to sound as it simply resonates, to live in the present moment. He also invites us to disconnect from the network and reconnect with ourselves, with a time that stretches out and becomes inhabited. This implies a different relationship to the world, and particularly to technology.
One is reminded of Nietzsche, who sought to “restore art to its existential value, to tear it away from its status as social entertainment and elevate it to the level of questioning - that is, to interrogate its relationship to life and knowledge.” He interpreted music as a reflection of the values of its era; his aesthetic reflection engages his entire philosophical thought. According to him, there is no civilization in which song, dance, and musical instruments are not intimately linked to all acts of social life.
This raises the question of the omnipresence of music in both public and private spaces today. It raises the question of meaning and of our trajectory through space and time. Does music today -particularly in public spaces - not often confine us to an overly narrow, even servile temporality, a diminished world? What does it reveal about our era and about our awareness of the world around us?
"Today's hybrid is tomorrow's mainstream"
Olivier Florio
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