Omar Cheikh - The Garden

A Closer Listen

Deeply rooted in the idea of the garden as a place of refuge and quiet transformation, Omar Cheikh’s The Garden unfolds like a series of nocturnal wanderings through an imagined landscape. The title evokes not only Voltaire’s famous injunction to “cultivate our garden” but also the older connection between garden and paradise: both originally denoted enclosed spaces where order and meaning could be nurtured against the chaos beyond.

Cheikh’s music inhabits precisely this liminal territory. Drawing on freak folk, pastoral electronica, tape manipulation and traces of industrial texture, the album signals a journey. The opening “varcamondi” — a neologism combining varcare (to cross) and mondi (worlds) — acts as a threshold, ushering the listener into a space where memory and dream overlap. A possible English translation could be “Wayfarer Between Worlds” and it is this suspended state that is being evoked in The Garden. Throughout the album, murmured melodies emerge from worn tape textures, arpeggios shimmer and dissolve, and sounds seem to grow organically rather than follow predetermined structures.

In The Kingdom and the Garden, Giorgio Agamben explored the theological and philosophical meaning of the Garden of Eden, arguing that the foundational myth of Western culture is not paradise itself but its loss. While nothing here suggests that Cheikh is referencing Eden there is a distinctly hauntological quality to The Garden. The ghost of Italian library music lingers in the background, particularly on the closing “cento candele,” whose delicate melancholy recalls the work of composers such as Egisto Macchi and Piero Umiliani. Yet the album never lapses into simple nostalgia. Like the imaginary garden of its title, this is music that offers neither escape nor certainty, but a temporary sanctuary in which the listener can pause, listen, and perhaps cultivate something of their own.

Here, Omar Cheick discusses the production process for his debut on Maple Death.

photo by Yevegeniya Kulikova

The Garden feels like a significant evolution of ideas already present in untitled produced together with Angelika Ploumidou (aka Arkangelo), where your sound world was described as “an emotional thesaurus for a new language of wonder.” Do you see the new album as continuing that search for new emotional or symbolic languages, and what has changed in your approach since then?

From my point of view, there’s no real demarcation in the production of tracks, I still follow a continuous line of research that’s very organic.

Some tracks date back a long time; others were written literally the day before entering the recording studio (like “Cavernina”) without any plan at all.

The fact that they’re then divided, grouped, and contextualized in different releases, in this case, tends to increase the points of contact/distance, especially through other’s eyes.

Both untitled and The Garden evoke a sense of ritual and transformation. The new record feels populated by strange figures, invented words, and shifting geometries. How do these imaginary worlds emerge in your work, and what role do titles and language play in shaping the music?

My approach is quite aleatoric and unfiltered at first and the imaginary worlds don’t usually arrive fully formed, they tend to emerge gradually, especially when I’m playing, like an animal looking for truffles, I mostly trust my nose.

While with images and texts, I take those pieces that I dug out and I try to organize them in space, primarily for myself, just to understand if I got something edible or just a rock. A title can frame a listening experience, suggest a direction, or introduce a productive ambiguity and what might initially seem like unrelated elements eventually reveal a shared atmosphere or set of concerns.

I’m interested in creating spaces that feel familiar enough to enter but unfamiliar enough to resist immediate interpretation. In general, I like naming things.

The album combines pastoral folk elements, industrial echoes, electronic textures, and moments that recall Fourth World music. How did you approach the production process, and how do you balance such different sonic materials while maintaining a coherent atmosphere?

There is never much planning involved in the process of writing, and above all, I’d say it is never my intention to actually write songs. I evoke soundscapes from scratch each time, and I tend to stay deeply within them.

Often, there’s no computer or recording involved; I’m lonely in a room with my tape decks, and my samplers, all together, making sound.

Sometimes everything can start with a few notes sampled from gnarly feedback, a cracking toy organ, sometimes it can be something I found in my archive that I completely forgot where it was recorded or where it came from, sometimes it can be an old tape from my grandma or wherever.

I honestly have no idea how to be coherent, at least how to do it on purpose.

I’ve grown up listening to really distant music genres, I mostly seek sounds that I feel I need to take care of, aside from their sonic nature.

Much of The Garden feels organic and alive, as if the compositions are growing rather than being constructed. Were the pieces carefully composed, or did they emerge through improvisation, layering, and experimentation in the studio?

My studio is in a crowded street and I have a broken window nearby that doesn’t really close itself and I have a natural tendency of playing mostly during the middle of the night, almost at the shift into the dawn where everything gets kinda quiet, those moments allow me to focus on what I’m doing and exception made for some random crackhead’s scream and a broken glass here and there I can freely improvise for hours without caring about anything.

Everything from The Garden is actually a demo I did by myself on a couple of those nights, when I did it I was sure that I was going to record it again in a better setting, with better gear and a less foggy head, but in the end, the tracks were there and it sounded right to leave them like this.

Leo told me that you don’t make records, you let them go. He’s a wise friend and I trust him.

Your work often seems concerned with states of transition, dissolution, and transformation. The liner notes for untitled spoke of “99.99% dilatation” and “dissolving,” while The Garden feels rooted in cycles of growth and decay. Are these recurring themes something you consciously explore, or do they emerge naturally from the creative process?

I wouldn’t say they always begin as conscious concepts, more often, they emerge organically through the process itself. Ideas evolve, forms break apart, meanings shift and I’m naturally drawn to paying attention to those moments rather than trying to stabilize them too quickly. I think these themes recur because they resonate with my experience.

Rather than presenting change as something exceptional, I prefer to see it as a fundamental condition, sometimes unsettling, sometimes generative.

These ideas may not always be planned from the outset, but they tend to surface repeatedly because they’re close to the way I understand things more broadly.

You work across drawing, sound, publishing, and collaborative artistic projects. Do you think of The Garden primarily as a musical release, or as part of a broader world-building practice in which sound, image, narrative, and symbolism are all interconnected?

I don’t feel a lot of distance between my practices if not for the outward profile and combining them is a good opportunity to give clarity to the ideas that pass through me, besides their nature.

Sometimes a visual motif, a narrative thread or the way certain objects are printed or crafted can deepen the experience of the music itself, at least in my personal experience, and besides this having a familiarity with different expressions for me is an unpretentious and constant practice of DIY.

(Gianmarco Del Re)