Olga Bell - Tempo

The Quietus

“You've got all the answers/ But you're dancin' on your own” smirks Olga Bell on ‘Power User’, the opening track of her new album Tempo. If her previous release, Krai, was concerned with evoking regions of Russia dreamt up from the past, all folkloric melodies and choral arrangements bent and warped over sparse electronic beats, then Tempo is firmly rooted the kind of loneliness that comes from much closer to home. It is a world full of dimly-lit, pulsating New York nightclubs, where Bell went to dance alone in the lead-up to writing the album, revelling in both the isolation and freedom that comes from being in a room full of strangers.

At times borrowing vocal tics from Bjork and occasional collaborator and Chairlift frontwoman Caroline Polachek, Bell uses her voice to its full capacity, yielding results that are in turn uncomfortable, sweet, and strange, yet always interesting. In the excellent ‘ATA’ she starts by isolating her voice, removing the comfort of surrounding beats and emphasising its fragility, making it more powerful when she shouts, full of loneliness and despair at the world, “am I fucking useless?” For lead single and standout ‘Randomness’ her voice is reduced to a background murmur, uneasy under the warping synths, with her staccato repetition of the title transforming her vocals into yet another layer of instrument. It’s a pure dance track, but one that constantly confronts its listener, never allowing them to feel totally comfortable.

This desire to destabilise and deconstruct runs as a thread throughout the album. For the house-inspired ‘Ritual’ Bell recruits Sara Lucas for the kind of powerful, polished vocals that come straight from a 90s dance banger, which she matches with fluttering, skewed beats. Not interested in pastiche or straight-up homage, she instead takes the recognisable features of a genre and subverts them; playing on our conceptions of musical familiarity and never letting the audience grow complacent. Similarly, ‘Doppio’ matches an almost dancehall beat – one of the most recognisable sounds in pop this summer – and matches it with a whispery vocal, only to have it mutate into something else completely, lowering the pitch on her voice until it becomes a squelchy, sticky treacle halfway through the line “this pick is so sick/ got a million clicks”, adding vocal tracks to her own voice, beginning to harmonise, a choir of mechanised angels. Never ironic or snide, despite her trawling of commercial EDM producer boards to find the sounds they favoured, Bell is nevertheless able to smartly destabilise the way in which we consume music.

It’s easy to see the differences between Krai and Tempo, yet there is a common thread between the two records: a sense of the familiar – whether that be a place or a mindset – that has been warped. Whilst the skewed Russian landscape of Krai may be more immediately striking to the listener, Tempo takes the territory of the New York club, bringing to the forefront its dark corners, its strange isolation. Bell’s mastery of subversion and convention enables the record to function as an exploration of dance and community; a reminder of how it feels to be alone, a stranger in a crowd.

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The Guardian 80

(One Little Indian)

It’s the spry unpredictability of Olga Bell’s vocal melodies and the restlessness of her rhythms that put her a cut above your average avant-garde producer. A former child classical pianist, the Russian-American’s last album, Krai, was a musical exploration of the far-flung edges of her homeland through folk and avant-garde electronics. Here she returns to the immediate electropop of her debut Diamonite, but with more muscle and shadow. There are thrills galore for fans of the Knife and Róisín Murphy (like Murphy’s Hairless Toys, Tempo is inspired by ball culture documentary Paris Is Burning), and nagging hooks too in the playful, compulsive herky-jerk of Randomness, the rippling, deep, dark housiness of Ritual or the seductive trip-hop of Power User.

Pitchfork 79

Where Olga Bell's last album, Край (Krai), offered an imaginary tour of her native Russia's hinterlands, Tempo represents a very different sort of ethnographical expedition: into contemporary club culture and '90s dance pop. In preparing for the album, the conservatory-educated musician made a habit of frequenting events like François Kevorkian's Sunday-night Deep Space parties at New York's Cielo club, where she would dance, Shazam, and, above all, listen closely to the inner workings of what she heard. (She made these research trips alone, she says, in order to avoid the distractions that would have accompanied going with friends.) Back in her studio, she browsed producers' forums to find out which VSTs young EDM producers currently favor—"I wanted to use sounds that I thought of as really commercial and almost kind of gross," she says—and she wrote out measure-by-measure transcriptions of vintage songs like Snap!'s classic "Rhythm Is a Dancer" and 2 Bad Mice's "Like It Deep," the better to understand their structural underpinnings.

But if this all sounds very academic, the project was motivated by a far simpler impulse: The desire to make joyful, body-moving music. She was especially inspired by the way that different tempos evoke different physical responses, so she began most songs by deciding which tempo matched her mood that day—hence the album's title—and then letting the music come to her as the metronome tick-tocked steadily away. The process yielded an array of rhythms across the spectrum, from woozy trip-hop to peak-time house to 160-BPM footwork.

The results resemble dance music as glimpsed through a funhouse mirror: strangely distorted, sometimes goofy, and deeply pleasing on a simple, almost childlike level. Pitch-shifted voices zoom across the stereo field like unknotted balloons, and bursts of tuned 808 toms and rimshots chatter like wind-up teeth. Common dance music tropes get magnified to exaggerated proportions: Trap finger-snaps echo through hangar-sized reverb in "ATA," and in the giddy "Randomness," trance stabs and synthesizer leads congeal into an ungainly heap, like a Jell-O mold filled with Eurodance. The bridge of "Power User" turns hip-hop's call to throw your hands up into a sing-song jump-rope rhyme. Stylistically, the music has little in common with Край; last year's Incitation EP anticipates Tempo's electronic palette but not its spunky sense of play. But what unites the three records is Bell's evident delight in the plasticity and malleability of sound. She's particularly fond of portamento, the effect that connects a run of notes in a long, sweeping motion, which she applies liberally to synths and voice alike, giving her melodies a springy, elastic sense of movement.

Bell may have trained as a pianist, but she proves to be a formidable singer: expressive, playful, inventive, and acrobatic without being showy. Just listen to the finely calibrated timing and the carefully cracked pitch of the way she sings, "You sulk, sit alone in a bar / Looking a little like a punchline, buddy" (from "Power User," which is decidedly not a toast for the douchebags). She can go from operatic finesse to a conspiratorial whisper in a single phrase, and she's never too polished to make time for hiccups, chuckles, and vocal fry. In fact it's often her voice that carries the day: Subtract the synths and beats from the gooey R&B jam "Zone," and the tune would hold up just fine as an a cappella, her multi-tracked harmonies stretched across the frame like a web of chewing gum.

Fortunately, despite Tempo's unusual backstory, nothing here scans as ironic. And in a few cases, Bell's outsider-looking-in setup has little bearing on the music itself. "Ritual," a full-blooded house anthem featuring the singer Sara Lucas (sounding a lot like Roísín Murphy in late-night-diva mode), wouldn't sound at all out of place on a crowded dancefloor at three in the morning. And the closing song, "America," makes for an uneasy comedown from all the carefree hijinks that have preceded it. Over a minor-key dirge, she gives her adopted homeland a stern talking-to—"Is that what you fear? That you're not forever?"—while tremulous organs and gleaming sawtooths explode like a halftime show. In the song's refrain, she jams an extra pause into the world and accents the final syllable—"Ameri-ca"—to make it suddenly sound foreign and strange. If the message of the song is that we can't dance away the end of empire, there's a subtler truth being made here: that we can wear our otherness like a badge of pride.