Odd Beholder — Dahlia

Odd Beholder, the electro wave / indie pop project of Swiss musician Daniela Weinmann, will release "Dahlia" on July 19 as the next single and soundtrack to the short film of the same name.

Dahlia is a flower is a piece of music is a film.

For their short film "Dahlia", filmmakers Agnès Tiberghien and Lumi Lausas approach Weinmann with a request to contribute the music. Weinmann agreed and wrote a song for the project that also functions as a film score: "It was like writing a song to a videoclip that already exists. I loved that approach."

The film tells the story of a woman who has romantic dreams about another woman. Weinmann explains: "I tried to follow the vision of Agnes Tiberghien but also tried to make it my own. For me, «Dahlia» became a manifesto for liberating one’s sexual fantasies. I wrote the song for women who are too shy to explore their own sexual desires, even in the privacy of their room, or even in the privacy of their mind.”

She continues: “Traditionally, women have been shamed about owning and enjoying their own body. This affects us to this day: If you type in «masturbation» into youtube, you will find many videos of people that counsel you how to stop it, as if it was a bad thing. I find it harmful that a lot of conservative communities all over the world teach that it is a sinful practice. I can recommend the documentary film "#Female Pleasure" by Swiss director Barbara Miller on this topic."

Weinmann approaches the songwriting process in an abstract, almost mathematical way. She analyzed the roughcut of the film and assigned colors to the different parts to indicate their mood. After that she chose a tempo and split the different parts into bars. Then she wrote the song into the grid that she had created. The gently flowing dreampop-like passages got combined with an open, almost experimental section in the middle of the piece, which is reminiscent of György Ligeti's early electronic music compositions.

Weinmann follows the respective images with the text, playing with metaphors and erotic symbolism: “I sing ‘I feel you deep inside of me’ and you can see the protagonist putting a flower into a vase. Or I sing ‘I’m too scared of breaking things’ when the vase shatters. I find this in a very subtle way funny since it references the Literal Music videos, a form of memes, where the song lyrics are altered to describe exactly what’s going on in the music video – and thus point out the randomness of certain music videos.”

Both the song and the video are a nod to the post-ironic vibe for Weinmann. It is kitsch and awkward and beautiful at the same time. Weinmann says: “There are moments of exaggeration and even clownesque scenes, but there is also a tenderness that is serious. I guess this is also an obvious nod to the first season of Twin Peaks which balanced this very well: The serious surreal undercurrent of meaning, the awkward acting and storytelling, the weirdly displaced, sort of chaste erotic tension that seems to draw on the aesthetics of ads.”

The short film "Dahlia" is written and produced by Agnès Tiberghien, directed by Lumi Lausas and shot on analogue film by Olivia Peters. Weinmann says: “I particularily love that all the defining roles on set were in the hands of women. It’s sad that this feels still remarkable in 2024."

She adds: "We conceived this project during the pandemic, we felt like we wanted to give the world something pleasurable, sweet, fun and dreamy. Like a treat. A quiet celebration. We even developed a Dahlia scent with the perfumer Liza Witte (based in Amsterdam). I found it remarkable that we couldn’t get funding for this project. Sensuality is still frowned upon, beauty, fun, female coded colorful things are seen as inferior. But it was the people who then funded it, all my dear friends, many women amongst them. My sister, my grandma, my besties, even my former boss who was the first female director of the gymnasium I worked at back in the days. I’ve got a feeling that women know what this is about and why this matters.”