sound + video
girl (Lennon-Mccartney) (2021)
By Olana Flynn and Matt Krefting
Beatles cover commissioned by Denis Tyfus for his installation The Seventh Beatle in Antwerp, Belgium.
The Seventh Beatle (2021) is a wooden jukebox with a hyper-realistic sculpture of Tyfus's father, dressed as Paul McCartney. In 1965 the former won a McCartney lookalike competition in the teen magazine Juke Box. The jukebox has only one button and is called a No Choice jukebox by the artist. It contains 272 covers of The Beatles songs, performed by various local and international musicians and artists. (Translated from Dutch)
sing the next time (2021)
Crude Tapes is excited to share Olana Z Flynn’s first solo music release - Sing the Next Time. Flynn, a formally trained dancer and choreographer, has organically developed a music practice to score her own live performances. With Sing the Next Time, Flynn worked on a body of music explicitly not meant for live performance while retaining the “liveness” of her previous work. The result is a haunting confluence of the American noise tradition and the American folk tradition. Two forms both firmly rooted in tradition and ritual, Flynn is able to transcend both by artfully juxtaposing these different styles through minimal means. Electronic motifs bubble and overtake while her voice comes in and out -- an oscillation of rhythm, feedback, and voice. Spanning the entirety of Side B, “bow down like the willow / come and go with me” is the apex of Flynn’s musical and conceptual ideas: seamlessly blending noisey electronics with vocal interpolations of American folks tunes all performed in one take.
All proceeds to benefit Ma’s House Studio.
these roots that grow between (2020)
by Olana Flynn and Kendall Loyer
Score by Olana Flynn featuring Flying Back to Death by Terry Turtle
Editing by Olana Flynn
Created for the Appalachian Studies Conference digital archive based on a live performance which was cancelled due to COVID-19 at the 2020 Conference, "Appalachian Understories: Growing Hope and Resilience from Commonwealth to Global Commons", at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. “These Roots That Grow Between” explores place-making, memory, nostalgia, and alternative modes of connectedness through sound, dance, and moving image. Using contemporary improvisational dance and electronic music we draw on our work as visual artists and writers to embody personal narratives reimagined as photographic stills that develop, overlap, and merge into one another. Originally intended as a live performance, the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated a shift in medium. Footage was filmed independently on opposite sides of the country using our original performance as a roadmap. We create a world and language across distance in which we invoke otherwise ways of knowing each other and queer ways of being together: being alone together, kinship in collaboration, seeing without looking, intimacy without touching, talking without speaking. Inevitably the shift from live performance to video also introduced new concepts to the work -- in particular tensions between the industrial and natural, electronic and acoustic, metal and wood emerged. This work acknowledges a liminal, embodied, queer, nuanced, radical connectivity that is an essential and inherent lifeway in Appalachia.
Untidy Audio compilation (released 2020)
Double cassette noise and experimental electronic music compilation curated, recorded, and released by Dan Greenwood (Diagram A)
Wayfaring Stranger was recorded in October 2019 at Cold Spring Hollow in Belchertown, MA.
Contact to purchase.
Bombay beach (2020)
By Olana Z Flynn
Filmed by Joel Smith
Premiered February 2020 as part of OFF LOCATION at Entrance — a screening featuring work by multiple artists including Charles Atlas
Bombay Beach, California is a town of approximately 150 people that sits at -223 feet below sea level on the Eastern Shore of the Salton Sea – an accidentally manmade, highly polluted lake in the Colorado Desert. During the mid-twentieth century it was a resort town primarily for people from Los Angeles and Palm Springs. Since 2015, for one weekend a year it is flooded by people for the Bombay Beach Biennial, “a renegade celebration of art, music, and philosophy that takes place on the literal edge of western civilization.” The rest of the year, in a 363 day off season, it sits haunted but forgotten except for by the people who drive out, maybe to look at the leftover largescale Biennial installation structures (some of which are in this video) but mostly to witness the towns’ forgotten-ness. For two years I lived just a couple of hours from Bombay Beach and visited often but always during the off season. This video is part of a larger multi-disciplinary body of work that utilizes multiple exposure, looping, and layering to engage in questions about time, history, memory, and liminality.
The Oxbow Series
A series of 'dance films' filmed in the Oxbow in Northampton, Massachusetts during the winter and spring of 2016. Each filmed in half an hour or less, always outside, filmed with an iPhone, and lit by car headlights the Oxbow Series is my way of saying no to the preciousness of dance making and yes to the making of any old thing. With a play between seriousness and comedy they are my response to feelings of stagnancy, sadness, and winter in New England.