Remember the beautiful French-Finnish singer we photographed for our Flora/Fauna issue? Olivia Merilahti not only looks good in the Andrea Crews collection, she also happens to be quite the eye-catcher on stage. She and her partner Dan Levy form the musical duo The Dø, who stormed the French charts with their first album A Mouthful in 2008 and are now back with a promising new album to be released on March 7. We were intrigued by their enigmatic new video Slippery Slope and decided to catch up with the beautiful singer:
sleek: Your new video clip for the track « Slippery Slope » is more focused on an expressive performance than the previous ones, where you presented yourselves as a rather well-mannered couple…
Olivia Merilahti: Everything went so fast after the release of our first album A Mouthful in 2008. Dan and I were used to focus entirely on composing music and performing on stage, so it was kind of weird to expect some idea for a video clip to just come out of nowhere. Our first videos might be more innocent but we could experiment on our visual identity through them. This time, we wanted to have a proper choreography that embodies the rhythm and feelings of the song. We chose Slippery Slope because it has a somewhat ethnical and raw beat which was the perfect set for a video clip. Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was a major influence for this mise-en-scène. His way of pushing boundaries of rhythmic structures does still matter nowadays. In comparison to our previous videos, we wanted to break with this typical “couple image” that people expect from a musical duo, so we tried to fuse with the performance itself. At the beginning we were thinking of Romain Gavras as our video director (Gavras did controversial video clips for Justice and M.I.A), he’s got talent for creating intriguing atmospheres, but now, with all the hype, I guess he is way too expensive. In the end we were glad to take a more subtle path by working with Noel Paul of the director duo That Go . He immediately understood our vision of Slippery Slope, it was the perfect match!
sleek: In this auto-tune dominated day and age, actual composing seems to be disappearing from popular music…
OM: Most songs today only have one melody line. We like to play with various themes. Dan and I used to work on movie soundtracks before we started The Dø, this might have influenced our melodic compositions. We work as a duo in our studio, Dan is a multi-instrumentalist, I rather focus on writing and singing. Regarding our performances, we evolved a lot since our first album! In 2005 we started as three musicians on stage: Dan on the bass-guitar, me on the vocals and e-guitar with a drummer. Nowadays, we’re a team of six musicians, including three new musicians for strings and e-guitar, who will put the live performance on a whole other level. We constantly try to cover the tracks of our past work, in order to refresh our concept of music. We’re proud of what has been achieved yet, but we don’t stick to a certain type of music, because we want a timeless result. We don’t want to be assimilated to a particular musical scene, we’d rather be a musical alien than doing expected pop songs. For instance, I’d like to put jazz music as well as musical songs in our upcoming work. Let’s just experiment and see what we’d end up with.
sleek: I’ve heard that you and Dan recently fell in love with Berlin…
OM: In fact, my heart belongs to London for musical matters, I’d like to move there as soon as possible! Dan and I like to spend time in Berlin, in order to escape from cold-hearted Paris now and then. I don’t know yet if we will establish ourselves there, but we’ll definitely be around more often from now on!
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/17607176[/vimeo]