Russian-born, New York-based composer Olga Bell is unveiling a new track entitled “Stavropol Krai” off her forthcoming full length, Krai, due April 29th via New Amsterdam Records (North America) and One Little Indian (UK/EU/Russia/Asia). The track follows the release of “Perm Krai,” which Pitchfork premiered, noting that one could listen to the track “like you would peck at a fancy tasting plate, snacking on bright blobs and crunchy bits on a backing of white space,” while Chicago Reader praised “Perm Krai,” noting “the music alternates between dense and frenetic, airy and meditative, but the arrangements are never less than rigorous.” All formats of Krai are available for pre-order directly from New Amsterdam here, including a limited-edition red vinyl 12″ LP packaged in double foil-stamped sleeves — a collaboration with London-based One Little Indian Records.
On Monday, April 28 at Manhattan’s Le Poisson Rouge, Olga Bell will perform the NYC premiere ofKrai, her 12-person electro-acoustic song cycle about nine frontier territories in Russia. Aaron Arntz (Grizzly Bear), Chris Bear (Grizzly Bear) and Ben Campbell (Build) will open the evening with a trio set.
Listen to “Stavropol Krai” here; read about it below:
Between Ukraine and Kazakhstan lies some of Russia’s most agriculturally productive land, with
Stavropol Krai at its center. In the opening of this piece, the cycle’s fourth movement, Olga Bell sings about “wide earth” over calm, sunny notes from Grey McMurray’s guitar. This is Krai at its most pastoral, verging on Oklahoma!-like optimism. What follows is very different: a dark, traditional sacred fable about three angels encountering a lost soul that ‘walked past’ heaven, but didn’t come in. “Our heaven is so beautiful,” one angel intones, with child-like purity and frankness, “but no-one is there.”
Just after the two-minute mark of “Stavropol Krai,” Bell introduces a crisp trap hat that’s somehow perfectly at home in the low simmer of shakers, claves, bass grace-notes and a lithe, bird-like synth. A minute later the band vanishes and a lonely rhodes is left repeating the same two-beat phrase like a broken record, or someone in shock. The angels begin to accuse the soul of vanity and greed, their voices rising in an angry mob: “you broke the law… and lost your soul”. They repeat this judgement over the last two minutes of the song, singing slowly and deliberately, while the soul desperately recounts the utopian promise of the movement’s opening lines.
More about the album:
Inspired by the lesser-known corners of Bell’s homeland and written entirely in her native Russian,
Krai is Bell’s second LP and first large-scale composition. Krai (край) is the Russian word for edge, limit, frontier or hinterland. Present-day Russia is divided into a myriad of ‘federal subjects’, including nine krais. In this capacity the term is a political designation, like ‘territory’, but for the earliest Russians these places represented both the promise and terror of the vast unknown.
While much has been written about Russia’s major cities, Olga Bell’s Krai is concerned with the rest of the map: the wilderness, the towns, the inhabitants and their stories. From the Cossack melodies of Krasnodar Krai in the West to the Chukchi drumming of Kamchatka Krai in the Russian Far East, Krai is a journey across the Eurasian landmass in forty minutes.
Born in Moscow and raised in Alaska, Olga Bell is an American composer, producer and performer based in Brooklyn. A prodigious classical pianist as a child and teenager, Bell graduated from the New England Conservatory at age 21 before moving to New York City to pursue electronic composition and songwriting. The past nine years have seen Bell’s steady rise from the city’s open mics to performances at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center.
Bell makes original music, remixes and videos under her own name. As half of Nothankyou, Bell makes electronic music with British musician Tom Vek. In 2012 Bell joined Dirty Projectors for the band’s Swing Lo Magellan cycle and remains a keyboardist and singer with the band today.
