Today we’d like to introduce you to Olivia W-B.
Every artist has a unique story. Can you briefly walk us through yours?
I was a very sensitive kid and I’ve spent most of my life trying to figure out how to temper that without compromising the details of my interior reality. Like so many youth grappling with the dissonance of what-you-want-to-do versus what-you-are-being-told-to-do, I found both solace and vindication in music; it offered new perspectives and was a way of stretching the parameters of an otherwise narrow-seeming reality.
In my late teens I was super grateful to find DIY music scenes on Cape Cod and in Boston. Those scenes were practice spaces both for musical experimentation as well as for reimagining what social interaction and community building could be like outside of school, work and mainstream media.
After a while of living in Boston I found myself straddling both the noise scene and the more anarchist punk scene, which didn’t have much overlap. That lack initially kind of surprised me because I think they have something pretty big in common: both are groups of people trying to actively create the spaces that they wish were in existence, not waiting around for an institution or pop culture to legitimize their desires. They’re just like, “Ok – fine! If this doesn’t exist but we want it to, we’re going to make it happen and we’re going to start right now.”
The skills that people develop within music scenes from collaborating, networking, publicizing, imagining a project and then working at it until you see it through are all applicable and transferrable to other kinds of community organizing and resistance to whatever problems you have with how the world is operating. So, these interests of mine have always felt more than parallel; they are intertwined, they inform each other.
Alongside my music practice I’ve stepped in and out of a lot of different projects but what I’ve focused most of my energy towards is learning about the School-to-Prison-Pipeline. I’ve interned at the Albany Free School, facilitated an art program in a prison, and helped assemble and distribute a publication called Prison Action News written by-and-for incarcerated people to spread word of their resistance from behind bars. Currently I also coordinate the Worcester Artist-Activist Residency, which supports people whose work explores the political potential of culture by providing a free space for them to focus on their projects for one to three months.
I feel strongly about self-determination; if given the ability and resources to assess their own problems and organize their own systems of care and structure in society, groups of people can better fulfill themselves and respectfully live within their larger environment than any distant government or bureaucracy could prescribe. So, both inside and outside of music scenes I spend most of my life learning about and getting involved in spaces where people are trying to build up that self-determination, while examining the overlap between culture and politics.
Please tell us about your art.
I write music that plays with the tension and relief between the scribbly and scripted. My current projects include solo acoustic guitar and singing under my own name, reworking and arranging some of those songs written for solo guitar in a full band called Other Joliah, writing lyrics and doing vocals for a math punk band called Rong, and playing guitar in a spazzy 3-piece instrumental project called Hairbrush. This fall I will be entering New England Conservatory’s Contemporary Improvisation program where I’m excited to gain the skills to compose for ensembles and work with different skillsets and instruments than are common in DIY.
All music plays with expectation to varying extents, and that’s a primary thing I focus on when I’m writing. I like to set up a song so that it seems like one thing might happen, but then chop it up a little to make it feel kind of awkward and hiccupy while still being loosely recognizable.
I think that the decisions that people make consciously or subconsciously to replicate or discard certain musical cues are informed by much deeper currents of social and political history. Hearing is a physiological process which interprets the space around you, and music distorts and augments and rearranges this information to evoke different emotions. Music can mimic or break off from auditory patterns heard in the world, and just as much as music can serve as escapism it can also be a means for referencing the past and reimagining the possibilities of one’s surroundings.
I don’t want to sound too stern because I am very opinionated, but I’m also wicked cartoony and that’s important to me. So the music I make is a mix of real critique of huge cultural and political problems, but is also a lot like the soundtrack to a claymation of myself trying not to get eaten alive by some tentacled monster. I want to make frilly, frenetic, anxiety-inducing music because sonically that’s actually truly what I want to hear. But ultimately, I want the messaging of my work to help people question patterns of experiences and then think constructively about how to change them.
Sometimes impending doom-themed art and music can feel like a dead-end to action because there’s this implication that “no future” equals “no point in resisting present problems.” But I’m bored of apathy and I think that there’s so much worth living and fighting for. In the Claymation of my imagination, passivity is the monster lurching alongside intentional brutality.
At the same time, I feel skeptical of strains of identity politics that absolutely locate the oppressor within individuals, as if any given bad behavior is an intrinsically evil part of you that needs to be exorcised. I want people to see the ways that their personal experiences relate to larger social patterns that stem from systems of power not so that we can all sit on our hands and say “I depend on this system and therefore I must be a terrible person!!!!” or, “Well, in a perfect world…but we don’t live in a perfect world, so…” or, “This is all much bigger than me, so I’m just going to go subscribe to nihilism now” – but so that we can be more informed of what leverage we actually do have against various systems of oppression.
Do you have any advice for other artists? Any lessons you wished you learned earlier?
I guess the biggest thing is that you get better by doing. I was very shy for most of my life so it was hard to start taking risks of performing, sharing work, and trying to collaborate with other people. But ultimately, it’s through trial and error that you learn to trust your own ability to get better, and it’s through trial and error that you actually get better, and once you start to really trust that you will continue getting better at your work even if there are flubs and setbacks from time to time, it gets way easier to keep putting yourself out there. I’ve embarrassed myself a million times but now I know that embarrassment will pass and it also doesn’t have to be that big of a deal if it happens again. I kind of feel like the worst-case scenario with performing is that you will be uninteresting, unremarkable, unmemorable. Also, a lot of people might seem like they know what they’re doing but surprise! Many don’t. And you can seem like you might know what you’re doing without really knowing what you’re doing, too. Also, don’t forget to stretch, cuz tendonitis is pretty annoying.
How or where can people see your work? How can people support your work?
Rong will be putting out a cassette split with the band Landowner through Midnight Werewolf Records by the end of July or early August, then heading out on an east coast tour and recording a full album at the end of August. You can learn about our upcoming shows and hear some live performances here: http://rong.team
Other Joliah has been in the studio recording a full-length that we will probably release this coming winter or spring. For now, you can listen to the solo recordings that much of our full band material is based off of here: http://olivia-w-b.bandcamp.com
You can learn more about the Worcester Artist-Activist Residency here: http://worcesterartistactivistresidency.weebly.com
Contact Info:
- Website: http://olivia-w-b.com/
- Email: lunch@riseup.net
- Other: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQUVQdrfSTaBgqEHjzUl8sg
Image Credit:
Ali Reid, Rob Nuuja, Willem Ytsma
Lydia and Mary Hart
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