DULUTH — Unlike the musicians she amplifies, audio engineer Kristi Olson isn't used to being photographed and interviewed. Typically in her line of work, Olson explained, "When you get noticed, something's going wrong."
For anyone paying attention to Duluth's music scene over the past year, though, it's been increasingly hard not to notice Olson and the work she's done to support local artists. In addition to running live sound at venues across the Twin Ports, Olson publishes a zine called On the Record.
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"There's like five of us that run around town every other Tuesday and drop them off" at dozens of local businesses, said Olson about copies of the free zine. ("Zine," abbreviated from "magazine," is a colloquial word describing a self-published periodical.)
"The folks that have been helping me with this," Olson said, "I'm so grateful for them for just volunteering out of the kindness of their hearts. The goal is to be able to pay these people, maybe eventually pay myself."
In addition to the 20-plus hours each week that Olson puts into On the Record as a "labor of love," she keeps a busy schedule running sound at venues including Bent Paddle Brewing, where she was recently named audio engineer and booking manager.
Olson's Instagram moniker is "That Sound Lady," a play on an all-too-common assumption musicians make when arriving at a venue.
"People always, if they don't know me, they'll show up and ask, 'Where's the sound guy?' That's just the standard term, a 'sound guy,'" explained Olson. When she led audio engineering at Earth Rider Brewery, "some bands that didn't know me would show up and immediately talk to my male intern."
For the uninitiated: At a venue, an audio engineer is responsible for ensuring musicians' work reaches your ears and sounds the way the artists intended.
"Any time there's a sound system, amplifying musicians or (people speaking), an audio engineer's there to set everything up, plug everything in and make it sound good," explained Olson. "And then tear it all down at the end."
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Being successful in the role requires knowing both the art and the science of live music — and having "a thick skin," noted Duluth musician Heidi Feroe.
"She's always just totally present and listens to what we have to say," said Feroe, a member of the band Babie Eyes, about Olson. "Everybody always sounds good when she is doing the sound. I've never had a time where I've even been a little frustrated with her."
Feroe has framed a clipping from Olson's zine, which published a review of Babie Eyes' 2023 debut album. "She wrote a really great article," said Feroe. "I'll keep that forever."
It's an example of the power of print, a medium Olson is committed to although she also posts the zine online. "JS Print is giving me a slammin' deal, but it's still just insanely expensive, even at cost," said Olson.
Despite the expense, Olson continued, "The feedback that I've gotten about having it in print has been overwhelmingly so good. People love holding something physical in their hands, and just going, 'Wow, look at all these things happening.' And it's been so cool to see people pick up a physical edition and sit down with someone and have some real discourse around the arts."
A Duluth artist and educator known professionally as Melolagnia remembered first spotting the zine at Wussow's Concert Cafe. "I messaged (Olson) and I was like, 'I would love to be involved in this. I've done interviews before,'" said Melolagnia. "And she was super open to it."
For the past several months, Melolagnia has been contributing musician and artist interviews and has been impressed by how her interviewees have opened up about difficult topics. For example, Moira Villiard talked about her work involving homelessness, and Lyla Abukhodair addressed the devastation in her family's homeland of Palestine.
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"It's helped people to understand the creative people in this community," Melolagnia said about On the Record.
Olson launched the zine in June 2023, during a time of personal grief. "My mom passed away from brain cancer, like six months before I started (On the Record)," said Olson. "She was an excellent supporter of the arts ... so part of this was kind of in honor of her, and with the manic momentum that grief gives you."
Raised on a farm in North Dakota, Olson came to Duluth in 2010 to attend college at the University of Minnesota Duluth. "I came here," she remembered. "It felt nice and the lake is pretty, and that was about the (thinking) that went into it!" She also found quality day care for her child, a son born during her last year of college, and would ultimately meet her wife in Duluth.
In the meantime, Olson studied music education at the University of Wisconsin-Superior and began teaching — just as the COVID-19 virus arrived.
"What a time to enter education," Olson said with a rueful chuckle. Aside from pandemic disruptions, Olson soon realized that education wasn't the right field for her.
"I took an audio and production tech internship at Earth Rider, and loved it," Olson said. "I finally found my niche in music."
Olson set out to master the technology involved with live sound and soon discovered that "a lot of audio engineering is just knowing what to listen for. With a music background, being a music director, it's a lot easier for me to hone in on exactly what I want to be listening for at any given moment."
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"She just works so well with everyone I've ever seen her work with," said Jason Wussow, owner of Wussow's Concert Cafe. "Helping get bands exactly what they need ... (She's) just always really friendly and helps everyone have a great show."
"I love working with artists to come up with creative solutions to creative problems," said Olson, "whether it's navigating a new pedal situation that a guitar player has ... or if we need to MacGyver something together to make it work if we're short on mics."
"When she was doing Homegrown," said Wussow, "she was like, 'I'm just bringing my own cables because I want to make sure they work.' Some of the best engineers have a box of their own toys ... (it) just gives you that extra edge, to be ready."
But it was Olson's experience as a music fan, not an engineer, that inspired her zine and its show calendar. "I'd have a rare night off on a weekend," she said, "and want to go do something, and it's so hard to find where the shows are."
Duluth has seen some similar zine-style publications, including The Transistor (2004-2019) and a more recent, smaller-scale project called Lake Inferior. Hoping to contribute to the local music scene, Olson considered founding a new venue, but in the wake of her mother's death, she refocused and landed on the idea of On the Record.
"It felt like what we needed was this missing piece of telling people about the shows," she decided, "rather than relying on 'if you build it, they'll come.'"
A year later, On the Record is gaining momentum, with advertising space and memberships available for people who want to support the project. Olson makes a special point of using her platform to highlight artists from historically marginalized groups.
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"There's been this frustration that artists of color, and trans artists, nonbinary artists, are just shoved under the rug," Olson explained, "and then we end up losing these amazing artists, to usually the Cities, then their music takes off. So we've had an internal community problem with that. (With the zine) we're doing our little piece to correct that."
On the Record will celebrate its first anniversary with a show at Earth Rider on June 15. Nine acts are booked for the brewery's outdoor festival stage, with salsa lessons and a dance party planned for the Cedar Lounge tap room. The event will also have a visual art element, with dozens of artists represented in an exhibition.
So far, Olson said, indications are that On the Record is on the right track.
"I've gotten a lot of feedback from artists, from musicians," said Olson, "saying that this has really helped a lot. They're seeing better turnout at shows and people are not just more informed about what's going on, but also more informed about the arts community as a whole."
The Trust Project
