About
Weston Olencki
I am a musician, composer, and sound artist. I’m currently making work centered around questions of instrumental music and its contexts/constructs, various mediated practices of listening and improvisation, and the technological, material, and cultural histories of rural space/time.
I’ve performed and presented work at the Borealis Festival, ISSUE Project Room, REDCAT, bludenzer tage zeitgemäßer musik, Ghent Jazz Festival, Blanton Museum of Art, philharmonie luxembourg, Squeaky Wheel, Festival Musica, kalvfestivalen, the American Academy in Rome, Frequency Festival, Indexical, and the OPTION series, and was awarded the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis from the 2016 Darmstadt Ferienkurse.
I’ve held residencies at the University of Huddersfield, Harvard, NYU, Columbia, Princeton, Stanford, Northwestern, and was a 2018 visiting artist at CalArts. Various recording projects have been released by HatHut, Not Two, Sound American, Parlour Tapes+, Carrier Records, New Amsterdam, Clean Feed, Anticausal Systems, Dinzu Artefacts, SUPERPANG, Creative Sources, and my first solo brass release SOLO WORKS, which featured on Bandcamp Daily’s Best Experimental Music of 2020. I am an active member of RAGE THORMBONES, Ensemble Pamplemousse, the Wet Ink Large Ensemble, and perform regularly as a soloist and ensemble member on low brass instruments and various electronic media. I currently live on occupied, unceded land of the Abenaki Nation, in what is known today as Brattleboro, Vermont.
what others say:
‘…a wild, exhilarating, disturbing picture of our pixelated times…’ - LA times
‘…his trombone playing produces rich, dense walls of sound that fill the entire audible range with throbbing partials in a single breath. His pieces are all-encompassing sonic experiences. The opaque, blasting drones of ‘capacity’ for trombone are like scuba diving as a cruise liner passes directly over your head … Olencki’s playing and composition invites you to take intense pleasure in the physicality of both experiencing and creating sound.’ - The Wire
‘the soundscape for the trumpet at the end there I find intensely moving … it’s like a lament after that apocalypse of drone and circular breathing sonic impossibility [he] made with his trombone... A remarkable journey into a completely unique soundscape.’ - Tom Service on BBC Radio 3
“…[channeling] wind through trumpet, trombone, and euphonium, turning them into something more like power generators than instruments. You could call this an acoustic noise album, as Olencki’s playing has a kind of blasting, clear-the-fog quality to it. But that would also be oversimplifying the depth of this music, which is so visceral one can almost watch the air move from the speakers to your ears.” - Bandcamp Daily/Marc Masters on SOLO WORKS (featured in Best Experimental Music on Bandcamp, April 2020)
“No less intense is “zero said in a low voice,” where at the start two euphoniums are manipulated somehow to produce a fierce upper register racket that would make guitar feedback blush, before the instruments all descend steeply into droning growls heightened by subwoofer amplification. Four layers of trombone overdubs on “two big museums trying to push through other museums” generate stunning beating patterns and other psychoacoustic effects. Rarely has sonic deception proved so thrilling.” - Bandcamp Daily/Peter Margasak on RAGE THORMBONES (featured in Best Contemporary Classical Music on Bandcamp, June 2020)
‘…distinctly non-ethereal…’ - Alex Ross on RAGE THORMBONES
‘…this is no bullshit music…’ - SEISMOGRAF
‘a virtuosically abrasive combination of live and digital sounds’ Positionen
‘extreme, and extremely impressive brass explorations…’ - Brian Olewnick
‘Like a test tone picked up on a faltering frequency … These opening tracks are not pleasant listening. Imagine the sound of a balloon releasing air violently, rubber flapping against rubber in proximity to an ear drum. However, they work as earnest experiments in timbre, technique, and sonic perception. ’ - a closer listen
Appears on:
OOYH 013 Eric Wubbels / Charmaine Lee / Weston Olencki - Field of Action / contraposition