Serious people of the world, it’s time to put on your dancing shoes and get loose. It’s Olga Bell who advices you to. The restless Brooklynite, born in Moscow like geniuses Dostoevsky and t.A.T.u but raised in Alaska, is back with a new album tailored specifically for the body. Inspired by classic documentary “Paris Is Burning” and beat-driven ’90s music, “TEMPO” is going to be a physical record, an exploration of high speed, low pace, everything in between and the way they feel inside and outside. The first single is titled “Randomness” and you can hear it below.
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With its 125 beats per minute, “Randomness” is not a song you can sit down to. It commands you to turn whatever surface your feet are touching into an improvised dance floor. Don’t worry if you’re the shy type, it doesn’t want anything crazy from you. It is house music but of a strange, mutant type that allows for every kind of move as long as it comes from a place of liberation. Think of the crazy dances you would invent to MTV when you were a child: that is the spirit. Those ’90s dance hits are what Olga was inspired by, wonderful classics like Crystal Waters, Black Box and Robin S. that she remembers from her first years in the US. Don’t expect the sparkle and gloss those songs had. “Randomness” dissected its references with a digital scalpel and reassembled them diagonally, on a tilted angle, in a new weirder structure. One thing is sure though: the core is still the same. It’s music for you as a body, a simple body with no further classifier, a body that moves above all. Let’s have a ball. Category is: humans getting their kicks.
The video for “Randomness” was directed by Minister Atkins and serves ’90 house realness but with a much more subdued vibe, as it was a German Expressionist silent film about vogue culture. The dancers featured here are the center, and the periphery, of the action. Everything revolves around their gorgeous movements, severe one moment and fluid immediately after. Olga giving face and minimalist eleganza has our approval, too.
Written, produced and performed by Bell, “TEMPO” is out June 3rd via One Little Indian. Check cover art and tracklist below.
01. “Power User”
02. “Doppio”
03. “Randomness”
04. “ATA”
05. “Regular”
06. “Zone”
07. “Ritual” (ft. Sara Lucas)
08. “Your Life is a Lie”
09. “Stomach It”
10. “America”
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