There's a pulse, a beat to everything. From walking to the bus on the morning commute to waiting for the kettle to boil, life seems to pass at a certain rate, at a certain velocity.
Olga Bell seems to feel it dripping past; sometimes fast, sometimes slow, yet it's always there, always moving forward. Perhaps that's why she's called her new album 'Tempo'– as a reminder that the beat, surely, will always go on.
“I wanted to – more as a technical exercise – try my hand at creating physically compelling music across the BPM spectrum,” she tells Clash. “I wanted it to be something people could dance to.”
That's the prosaic answer, the 'technical exercise' as she puts it. But for Olga Bell, music isn't merely technical – it's something that overwhelms you, that seeps through to the corners of the soul. Inspired by cult films such as Paris Is Burning, she began investigating New York's vogue houses, bastions of queer culture and gender exploration. “I think that seeing that film not only made me have a whole new reverence for how important that sub-culture was – the gay voguing, and ballroom scenes of the early 90s – but also the raw energy and the passion and the beauty of that time.”
“I wanted to see if any of that was still around, because I think that it just seemed like a good anti-venom to the whole EDM thing that has happened over the last ten years.”
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Exploring the current iterations of vogue culture in New York, Olga Bell went on a personal search for something different, for somewhere more welcoming. “I just wanted to see if I could see if there was one place, or a few places, in New York where I could go by myself as a woman, alone, and not be harassed, and just be allowed to dance and enjoy the music and be part of this communal event.”
“The joy and the creativity and the freedom... all of those words are like things that embody dance music. And even lyrics to dance songs are all about getting lifted, and getting free, and getting to a better place than where you were when you walked into the club.”
Inspired, Olga Bell began experimenting with different tempos, different beat frequencies to see what impact this would have on her songwriting. The results would immediately fan out, a hugely broad array of feelings, emotions. “I'm sure that when you reach for your music collection on certain days you want certain things,” she says. “Just like you get a craving for certain tastes. I think I just wanted to create music that was maybe reaching for a utility or an efficiency that was reaching beyond just me being raw, expressing myself without giving a thought as to what people would do to it. Actually consciously making something that would be useful in people's lives.”
“Maybe as an artist you always end up making your own indulgent shit, because that's what art is to some extent. But yeah, I just wanted something that would be useful to people. And maybe delightful!”
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I just wanted something that would be useful to people...
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Pushed on this, Olga has a pleasingly down-to-Earth vision of her music's ergonomic use. “I think that I listen to music for a variety of different reasons,” she continues. “Y'know, sometimes you need something to clean your house to, sometimes you need something to do push ups too, and sometimes you need something to wallow around on the floor in misery to. There are lots of different temperatures, and ways in which music can be useful in your life.”
'Tempo' is certainly useful. It's an engrossing record, a physically and mentally fascinating one, with break out track 'ATA' finding its origins in a poem by Beat era poet Frank O'Hara. Written in 1958, 'A True Account Of Talking To The Sun On Fire Island' has many meanings, but – for Olga Bell, at least – it finds its greatest power when applied to the creative process.
“I really took away from it that you should always work with a certain humility about your art,” she explains. “It's very easy as a creative person, and as somebody who is really focussed on your own projects, and then especially when you move into the phase of doing promo and talking about them a lot – it's very easy to get super dooper myopic, and centre everything around your ego, and your expression, and you-you-you, and how this reflects on your canon. And what I got from this poem that the sun sort of says: don't worry too much about acceptance, or love, or your whole canon, just do your work like I do. Just rise, turn up for work, and you'll be fine.”
“Just be humble about it because at the end of the day it's just another job. And even though you pour your life into it – and for artists I think it's especially hard to separate your identity, your whole universe from what you do. It's really important to keep a bit of perspective. And I think it makes the work better, too. When you remember to just be humble about it, and to do your job.”
Well, you're pretty good at your job, Olga.
“I've never thought of myself as anything other than a musician, I'm obsessed with music, it's all I think about. It's all I do,” she says. “People ask me if I have any hobbies, and I don't. I go running a lot, and I don't listen to any music then because I just have music in my head all the time... and sounds and thoughts and ideas.”
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I just have music in my head all the time...
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“So obviously, it is really hard to separate the two. I guess... just treating your work humbly, and not like you're about to write your masterpiece because a lot of the time you can go about saying: OK, I need to write a hit. Or, I absolutely have to write a symphony – why am I not Mahler yet, or FKA twigs, or something. And you can't think that way. It's so destructive.”
“You have to just to do it because a) it's your job and b) you can't live without it. It's just a humble thing. You just sit down with your notepad at your computer and everyday you make some shit. And it's cool. And everyday the sun rises and shines. And that's what it does. It's glorious and miraculous and it's also totally quotidian.”
She's right, of course. But in picking apart the artistic process, in apply it to some curiously blunt, prosaic terms, Olga Bell may just have revealed an extra layer of poetry to her work.
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'Tempo' is out now. Watch out for more Olga Bell tour dates later in the year.