The Congregation
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Cleek Schrey - ten-string fiddle
Weston Olencki - wooden organ pipes, dc fan array, custom software
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A chorus of desiccated mechanical intonation, salvaged from abandoned Victorian technology.
A careening fiddle sermon blooming from ashes.
Friction of hair against string, air against wood - fading, disintegrating, blanched.
A meditation on our various organs: musical, liturgical, historical, corporeal, mechanical, metaphorical.
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Recorded in New Jersey, in June 2022.
still from Organs, presented & commissioned by Roulette Intermedium (Brooklyn, NY)
About
Weston Olencki is a musician, composer, and sound artist from South Carolina, living and working in Berlin. Their current work is 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. In recent projects these themes have manifested in fusions of experimentalism and noise with American traditional musics; site-specific sound work engaging with land and local histories of New England; the use of artificial (audio) intelligence, neural synthesis, and machine listening processes on “low-tech” materials; and a continued extension of the limits of instrumental performance on brass and wind instruments more broadly.
They have presented work at the Borealis Festival, ISSUE Project Room, REDCAT, Lampo, philharmonie luxembourg, Black Mountain College, the American Academy in Rome, Roulette Intermedium, Donaueschinger Musiktage, and Musica Nova (as a soloist with the Helsinki Philharmonic). Additionally, they were awarded the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis from the 2016 Darmstadt Ferienkurse. Various recording projects have been released by HatHut, Out of Your Head and Tripticks Tapes, Sound American, Carrier, New Amsterdam, Clean Feed, Lobby Art, Dinzu Artefacts, SUPERPANG, Notice Recordings, and upcoming releases on Astral Spirits and Infrequent Seams. Their latest recording/performance project, Old Time Music, was featured on Bandcamp Daily’s Best Experimental Music of 2022.
Described by the Irish Times as “a musician at one with his instrument and his music,” Cleek Schrey is a fiddler, composer, and filmmaker from Virginia, now based in NYC. He plays a range of instruments including the hardanger d’amore, a violin with sympathetic strings, and the daxophone, a wooden idiophone designed by Hans Reichel. Recent engagements include the Big Ears Festival (TN), the Kilkenny Arts Festival (IR), SuperSense Festival of the Ecstatic (Aus) and Issue Project Room (NYC).
Frequent collaborators include electronic music pioneer David Behrman, the viol da gamba player Liam Byrne, traditional fiddle icon Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, and composer Alvin Lucier. The journal Sound Post has noted that Schrey “possesses a rare combination of traits: deep respect for traditional music and the people who make it, and an unbounded curiosity about new directions for sound.”
He was a 2021 Pioneer Works Sound Artist-in-Residence on Governors Island and is currently a Resident Artist at Roulette.