Insight
Howling Silence
by Olga Amelchenko
The Artwork
In which musicians talk about the story and inspiration behind a recording
Faced with the title of Olga Amelchenko's new album, Dave Stapleton at Edition Records might well have gone for an album image like The Scream by Edvard Munch, but he thought it more appropriate to reflect Olga's background story.
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Olga Amelchenko was born in Russia in 1988. She began singing in a choir at the age of 5 and started playing the piano and dombra (a two-stringed fretted lute), two years later. In 2003 she went to the College of Music in Abakan to study choral conducting but then took up jazz saxophone. In 2006, Olga moved to Novosibirsk to study jazz at the College of Music. She graduated in 2010 and moved on to study saxophone at the Novosibirsk Conservatory.
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In 2012, Olga moved to Germany where she studied at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne before relocating to Berlin in 2014 to complete a Bachelor Degree in Jazz Performance in 2018, and a Master’s in Jazz Composition and Arrangement at the Jazz Institut Berlin in 2019. She then moved to Paris, where she leads the Olga Amelchenko Quartet and HELICON, while also performing with various other projects. Olga has collaborated with and recorded albums alongside numerous artists across different genres, in addition to performing at various venues and festivals across Europe and beyond.
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Marek Romański in Jazz Forum says: "Olga tells stories with her instrument; she wants to be heard and understood".
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Releasing her latest album on Edition Records they say: "Howling Silence blurs the line between a desire to speak out against an unjust world and the inherent restraint shaped by both her heritage and her experience as a woman working in a predominantly male jazz milieu". Dave Stapleton continues: "How do you show the struggle of speaking truth when the world around you insists on silence? That was the question at the heart of developing the artwork for Howling Silence. The process took us to Paris in late February, where a photographer and I captured a set of intimate, quietly charged portraits - each one playing with the tension between visibility and vulnerability. We wanted the image to speak with restraint. The stillness, the space - it all pushes the viewer to lean in, to feel what isn’t being said as much as what is.”
Designing around those images, Oli Bentley, Edition’s long term graphic designer, shaped a visual language that holds both protest and restraint in balance. "We explored bolder ideas - tape, close crops - but they felt too blunt for a record that speaks in shades."
"We spoke at length with Olga about the idea of Howling Silence and how speaking up or not so often isn’t a binary choice, but a delicate balance for each individual that no one else can judge. We tried to reflect this in the artwork – with Dave’s movement in the beautifully delicate yet dynamic image, the subtle colour palette, and why the covering of the mouth is a gradient. So little of life is one thing or another, and I really hope the nuances in the artwork reflect the nuances in Olga’s music, and the thoughtfulness in what she has to say.”
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As Oli says of the initial images: "The final artwork uses a border to create pause and distance, and we’ll be drawing on other images from the shoot for the second and third singles, each carrying a slightly different emotional charge."​
Olga Amelchenko's album Howling Silence is released on the 11th July. 2025 Details are here. Listen to the title track:
© Sandy Brown Jazz 2025.6