#360: Olivia O.

The Glow Pt. 2, Santa Sangre, Brown Noise, and more.

Perfectly Imperfect is a newsletter offering “A Taste of Someone’s Taste” from guests like Charli XCX, John Cale, Julian Casablancas, Lena Dunham, Mac Demarco, Dasha Nekrasova, Tim Heidecker, Ayo Edebiri, Michael Imperioli, Rayne Fisher-Quann, Mel Ottenberg, Chloe Cherry, Matty Matheson, Anna Delvey, The Dare, Caroline Calloway, Snail Mail, and more. Check out our full archive here.

Cool people like cool things, which is why we asked Olivia O. to share a taste of her taste on Perfectly Imperfect.

Olivia O.— aka Olivia Osby— is an Atlanta-born, Brooklyn-based musician who releases solo music and collaborates with musician & high school homie Avsha Weinberg via their band Lowertown. After a busy year of touring with acts like Porches, Beabadoobee, and Wet Leg, Olivia is back with a new solo album titled Everyone is a Light, her first since 2021. It’s intimate & gloomy collection of songs that often reminds me of Cat Power’s 1998 classic Moon Pix. Lowertown also has new music on the horizon and they’re kicking off their first headline tour next week. Olivia shares art such as their tour flyers, photography, paintings, and more on her Instagram account @bugz4brainz. Lucky for us, Olivia O. is here to tell us what she’s been into.

Without further ado

Olivia O. (instagram)

🩸 Santa Sangre

This is my all time favorite movie by one of my favorite directors and mad genius Alejandro Jodorowsky. 

It’s an insane movie: crazy cast of characters, outlandish plot, trippy cinematography, circus freaks. It starts somewhere you wouldn’t expect and ends somewhere completely different. 

It’s an odyssey. The beautiful insanity is both awe inducing and artistically refreshing. I couldn’t recommend it enough. 

🐘 The Glow Pt. 2 - The Microphones 

The first professional tattoo I ever got was the Elephant from the album cover of The Glow Pt. 2 on my right calf (secretly done in bushwick on a family trip to new york when I was a senior in high school)

I found this album in my sophomore year of highschool and it was the closest thing I have felt to a spiritual awakening. It’s raw, experimental, beautiful, and deeply vulnerable. It has been a key inspiration to a lot of my art and music since I was 16. 

👁️ Peep Show 

I was put onto this show the first time I lived in London by our friend and Engineer for the last two Lowertown projects, Joseph.

 It’s about two fucked up 30 yr olds living in London who are shit people in different ways. They destroy each other’s lives but also need each other to fill the painful, all consuming loneliness.  it’s relatable, disgusting, existential, yet very light hearted and completely hilarious.

It has become my all time comfort show, and I’ve seen all 9 seasons in their entirety an upwards of 5 or 6 times.

🧑‍🌾 Stardew Valley 

I’ve been obsessed with video games since I was a  small, teeny, little baby . My favorite kinds of games are open world and the really repetitive, calming, grindey ones, and Stardew falls under both.

 I’ve put over 300 hours of my life into this game and played it obsessively when we were recording my band’s EP “The Gaping Mouth”.

At first, the game seems pretty simple. You have your farm that you tend to next to a town full of different npc’s, but the more time you sink in, you realize there’s a lot of depth to the characters, and many different areas and secrets to the game. There’s mining, fighting monsters, mysteries, a few secretly profound lines of dialogue and some really dark but real story lines for some characters.

🌫️ Brown Noise 

i’m incredibly sensitive to external stimuli, especially noise (which I find a little funny because i’m a musician and surrounded by noise all the time) .

Brown noise is a less harsh version of white noise and I find it much more calming to listen to.

I play it quietly every night to sleep. Living in the city it helps to drown out all the weird chatter, chirping birds, car screeches, and cat fights. Or when I’m back home visiting family in Atlanta, where it tends to feel too quiet at night, it adds a nice cushion of noise to an overly dead room.

Another big use for me is when i’m overstimulated or anxious. On tour, I play it in my noise canceling headphones on long drives while I sleep or read to block out any talking and music. I also listen while I get ready before going on stage so I can focus on just what I need to do instead of getting distracted by what everyone else was doing around me

🌾🐝 Solitude and Stillness  

I feel like every year I burrow further into life, everything accelerates faster and faster, becoming more complex and confusing (and sometimes feeling so dark and serious). 

I feel like I’m always playing catch up with things that have happened, processing them weeks to months to years after they’ve occurred, or only fully appreciating a moment long after it’s passed. 

My best art and thinking has been when i was  alone in the middle of the night , with no noise or anything around to distract me.

I’ve been really into sitting and marinating in a quiet moment (going on a hike, looking out my apartment window in silence at night, journaling, reading an engrossing book, drawing) and attempting to detach myself from the small details and my day to day worries. 

🥃 Negronis

Dirty gin martinis are an all time favorite of mine, but negronis have worked their way into my life recently.

I tried one for the first time last winter at my favorite bar in my neighborhood and got hooked on the delicious and complex taste. A little sweet, bitter, herbal and citrusy.

 I’ve found every place does their negroni a little differently and the trick is in the slight difference in the ratio between the equal thirds of gin , campari, and sweet vermouth .

Some of my favorite negronis have been at dirty dives instead of the cleaner feeling, fancy negronis i’ve had at a nice restaurant or cocktail bar.

Bonus recommendation for paid subs from Olivia below! 🌿 ??