Review
Genre and Mood
Pablo Nouvelle and Fiona Daniel’s Is It Ok is downtempo built from samples, music that one profile said might a decade and a half earlier have been termed trip-hop, or more recently chillout. Its mood is melancholic and intimate: Pablo Nouvelle himself described the direction of his songs as a sort of melancholic pop music, and Fiona Daniel sings torchily.
Song Summary
Is It Ok was Pablo Nouvelle’s debut single, released in May 2012. It began as a sample: he wanted to work with the Swiss singer-songwriter Fiona Daniel, a friend of his girlfriend, and when she was not convinced he sampled her own song, sketched his ideas around it and showed her the result. That persuaded her, and they made the track together. Its original, Is It Ok?, appears on her debut album Drowning.
Musical Breakdown
No source describes the track part by part. What the sources do describe is the voice, the producer’s sound and the video.
Main Section
Listen for the voice against the beat. Fiona Daniel sings torchily, and Pablo Nouvelle said his drums are always still quite heavy, a habit from years of making hip-hop beats. Somewhere between the two sits the sampled material from her original song.
Outro
How the track ends is not described in any source.
Concepts in Focus
The track is a case of sampling turned into a partnership. When the artists he wrote to did not answer, he said, he ended up sampling a lot of the artists he liked; with Fiona Daniel the sample became the pitch that won her over, and German Wikipedia lists the result in her discography as an Is it Ok remix.
That is why she is a <a href=“https://korczis.github.io/sonic-playground/concept/featured-artist/” class=“concept-link font-medium text-primary-700 underline decoration-dotted underline-offset-4 hover:decoration-solid dark:text-primary-400” data-concept=“featured-artist” title=“A guest performer credited on another artist’s track, usually as “feat.”: a rapper’s verse, a singer’s hook or a second voice. Features bring together different styles and audiences and are central to hip-hop, R&B and dance music.“>featured artist rather than an anonymous sample: her name stands beside his on the single, and she worked with him again on later songs.
The music video was not shot for the song. It was a short film that a friend made, and the music was put to it; one profile heard in it the feel of a stylish, existentially vague French film starring Jean Seberg.
Artistic Context
Pablo Nouvelle is Fabio Friedli from Bern, a musician and animation-trained film-maker whose alias comes from a love of the French nouvelle vague. He started the project in June 2011. Fiona Daniel, born in Zurich in 1987, released Drowning in 2010. Is It Ok opens his self-titled EP, which MusicBrainz dates to June 2013 on Feraltone. Compare Wax Tailor, Charlotte Savary – Our Dance.
Impact and Reception
God Is In The TV introduced him in June 2012 on the strength of this single, and his debut album, All I Need, followed on Armada Music in 2016. Listen to the voice first, then to what is built around it.
