We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Olivia Diercks Karla Colahan a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Olivia Diercks, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

We opened for Swedish quintet, Jaerv, in 2017 at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis. We knew very little about their music, but were excited to play at the Cedar again. After hearing their set, we were floored not just at their musicianship, kindness, and the joy they exuded on stage, but at Swedish folk music. It wasn’t until years later that we realized our Western Classical training had prepared us well for Swedish folk music, much of which is derived from Baroque music.

Fast forward to 2021, after years of keeping in touch with Jaerv and sharing a handful of shows when they were in the we traveled to Sweden on a grant through the American Scandinavian Foundation to study traditional Swedish folk music and tour with Jaerv. To have this be our first international tour was so meaningful, as it was the culmination of years of musical friendship, camaraderie, and sharing of traditions. We came away with roughly 20 traditional Swedish tunes in our fingers with a deep desire to share them with our audiences, 3 new arrangements of both original and traditional material with Jaerv, and a cultural exchange of sorts that really felt like kismet.

Since then, Jaerv toured in the States with us in 2022, we went back to Sweden this summer for another tour, and we have many more dates and collaborations coming up. We feel so lucky to have met these fine musicians who we are now lucky enough to call friends, and to share in each others’ musical traditions in such a meaningful way.

Olivia Diercks, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

We are The OK Factor, a cello + violin duo based in Minneapolis, MN. We have been described as genre-bending, which highlights the difficulty in pinning us down, however “cross-genre” is the best way to categorize what we do, with heavy leans in the folk world, the western classical tradition, and anything that makes our toes tap.

We have been playing our instruments virtually our whole lives – Olivia starting the cello at age four, and Karla the violin at age five. We are trained in the Western Classical tradition, having met playing in the symphony and chamber orchestras together at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. It was at Luther that we discovered our mutual love for alternative styles of playing, our similar wide listening ears, and commitment to experimenting with what our instruments are capable of. You could say our foundation is rooted in stretching boundaries!

We have been writing and performing music together for a decade, and continue to have the same love for the joy it brings us and our audiences to experience music together. Our “tagline” is “sharing kindness through music”, and we thoroughly believe the world needs more of both of those things, these days in particular. From collaborating with symphony orchestras, to Swedish bands, to singer-songwriters, and everything in between, we thoroughly love what we do.

Another strong passion of ours is educational outreach. We find that speaking and performing with young string students, in particular, is one of the most important things we do. We encourage students to cultivate their unique musical voice – whatever that looks and sounds like to them. We feel more authenticity in the world, especially in this industry, is what will bring us all together.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

In the early years of our career, we were determined to prove ourselves. We felt we had to defend what we did to anyone and everyone who asked us questions about our genre, our music making, our training, etc. It’s not a good feeling nor is it sustainable to always be on defense. We’ve had to unlearn that mechanism, and instead understand that peoples’ constant need to categorize something they see and hear is more a reflection on our society and our human brains than it is something we’re doing wrong. Our art is our art. Period. It will grow and change as we do — if we let it. We have learned to follow the art instead of others’ perceptions of it, and it has led us to more beautiful moments than we can count.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

In our view, artists need each of their “consumers” to commit to support them in a variety of ways. We’re not going to advocate, for instance, that everybody stop streaming music. We do it. And we get it. It’s honestly convenient and so cool to have all your music at your fingertips! AND. If you stream an artists’ music, try to catch them at a live show. Buy one of their CD’s from their website. Support them on Patreon (yes – we have a Patreon – look up The OK Factor on patreon.com to learn more!). It is no longer sustainable for an artist to put all their eggs in one basket, relying on one revenue stream to carry them through, and we also can’t shy away from the way things are trending digitally. We need our listeners, our collectors, our followers, what have you, to commit to exploring the multiple ways they can support us – no matter how seemingly insignificant the amount or gesture. We assure you – it’s significant to us!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.theokfactor.com
• Instagram: @theokfactor
• Facebook: @theokfactor
• Youtube: www.youtube.com/theokfactor
• Other: www.patreon.com/theokfactor

Image Credits
Steena Anne Photography