I am a composer, musician, and audio engineer; originally from South Carolina; living and working now in Berlin. I’m currently making work focused around questions of instrumental music and its contexts/constructs, various mediated practices of listening and improvisation, and the technological, material, and cultural histories of vernacular art-making. My recent music deals with the non-linear relationships and unexpected resonances between experimental sound, geography, historicity, and (mostly American) musical traditions.
I’ve previously performed and presented work at the Borealis Festival, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Musica Nova (as a soloist with the Helsinki Philharmonic), Lampo, Ghent Jazz Festival, Black Mountain College, philharmonie luxembourg, Squeaky Wheel, Festival Musica, kalvfestivalen, the American Academy in Rome, Roulette Intermedium, Jalopy Theatre, Frequency Festival, Pioneer Works, and the OPTION series, & was awarded the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis from the 2016 Darmstadt Ferienkurse.
I’ve held guest residencies at the University of Huddersfield, Harvard, NYU, Columbia, Princeton, Stanford, Northwestern, and have been a visiting artist at CalArts (2018), Stoveworks (2023), and suddenlyLISTEN (2024). Various recording projects, both as a leader and side-person, have been released by HatHut, Sound American, Full Spectrum, New Amsterdam, Clean Feed, Longform Editions, Dinzu Artefacts, SUPERPANG, Tripticks Tapes, KAIROS, Lobby Art, Sound Holes, Astral Spirits, PAGANS, Out of Your Head, and more. My latest recording/performance project, Old Time Music, was featured on Bandcamp Daily’s Best Experimental Music of 2022. I am an active member of RAGE THORMBONES, Harmonic Space Orchestra, Ensemblekollektiv Berlin, APPARAT, Clone Decay (with Mary Halvorson & Kalia Vandever), The Hollows (with Nick Dunston & Etienne Nillesen), and perform regularly as a soloist and ensemble member on low brass instruments, winds, banjo, organs, and various electronics.
what others say:
‘…a wild, exhilarating, disturbing picture of our pixelated times…’ - LA times
‘…a trombone player with an exceptional feel for extended technique and torrential riffing’ - NY 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
‘…shockingly loud…” - New York City Jazz Record
‘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
‘With Solo Works, Olencki places himself in the lineages of pioneering horn players Nate Wooley, Greg Kelley, and George Lewis and their noisiest works. The unsettling, confrontational use of silence and noise recalls Polly Bradfield’s Solo Violin Improvisations, though this is much more noise than silence. This is one of the most challenging listens I’ve come across in some time. But the richly textural subversion of instrumental identities through novel preparations and simple but bold compositions keeps me coming back.’ - Free Jazz Blog/Keith Prosk (on SOLO WORKS)
‘Experimental composer and improviser Weston Olencki makes his conceptualism highly listenable on “Vernon, L.M.,” an old song from the Sacred Harp tradition translated through a mixture of pump organ, field recordings from an industrial gang saw recorded in a Vermont marble quarry, and software triggered by “handmade impulse responses of local barns, grain silos, train stations, discarded sheet metal, slate roof tiling, covered bridges, milk bottles, churches, beer tankers, frozen lakes, & more.” The work veers from meditative beauty to hypnotising noise. (The other piece on this recording, “Witched Windows,” also translates unconventional tape loop sources from around the state into a visceral collage potentially impacted by each tape spending three to eight months buried underground during the region’s rough winter months).’ - The Wire/Peter Margasak (on Verd Mont)
“Its cascading cataract of three-fingerpicking rolls, spoon castanet rhythms, and steam train horn hollers, its ghostly-grained chant in makam cadences, its corrugated buzz, tapped head, grandfather clock chimes, and crashing outpouring of rim and hoop percussion likewise a hillbilly frankenstein” - harmonic series/Keith Prosk (on Old Time Music)
“The three works here astound in their invention, conceptual gravitas, and sheer listenability…Kudos to Olencki for putting as much thought into how the end products sound as they did into making them. Drastically original and staggering stuff.” - an earful (on Old Time Music)
“It's Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music filtered thru minimalist drone like everything you'd want to hear going on at once, woozy like a ghost story campfire burning a victrola from a haunted house, sitting there in thee bottom of yr beer bottle” - rateyourmusic.com
“However, more important than the technique is the context and the emotional, powerful message of the music, which is a collage combining the musical traditions of the US. Olencki cleverly juxtaposes the two elements, showing new prospects for AI-controlled improvisation. The album is like a time machine that leads the listener through the history of bluegrass, sound recording techniques, and the radio, the first transmitter of information.” - Noweidzie Morza (Jakub Knera on Old Time Music)