New Weston Olencki & TAK ensemble LP available for pre-order now!
‘when the great fires were lit on the other side of the ocean’ is the first collaborative album written and developed by Berlin-based composer Weston Olencki and NYC’s TAK ensemble. Borrowing its title from the psychogeographical excursions of W.G. Sebald, when the great fires… takes its own journey through real and imagined histories of electricity, using myriad perspectives and mythologies around electrical force to re-enchant its ubiquitous presence throughout our recent past.
The musical settings are as varied as their source materials: slow-burning, mesmeric drones constructed from the harmonics of the 60Hz ground hum, crackling textures of the electromagnetic ether, field recordings taken at Nikola Tesla’s first AC power plant in Niagara Falls, and a speculative contrafactum of old Irish sean-nós balladry. Part chamber ensemble composition, part conceptual research obsession, when the great fires… grows from the possibilities of ‘what could have happened’ as much as dusty archival records, pulling the listener inside this teeming interconnected narrative across centuries and disciplines.
In addition to the vinyl, bonus materials include a densely footnoted article on the work’s source material, originally given as a lecture by scholar A. Gilbert Williamson in 2054 at Roulette Intermedium, and a professionally printed & bound copy of Olencki’s handwritten score.
(photo by Titilayo Ayangade)
Tangled Half-Signs
~ an interview with Weston about research obsessions and more ~
Jasper:
One thing that strikes me about your records is the specificity of materials often listed in the liner notes. Your use of instruments seems to intermingle with found objects and various elements like: railroad spikes, carriage bolts, mason jars, South Carolina red clay, exposed speaker cones filled with debris found on the CT river watershed. That last one sounds particularly exciting... How has this approach developed over time for you? What materials came into play on “when the great fires...”?
Weston:
This process first started around 2019, where I’d been trying to make music that wasn’t just predicated on either instrumental (extended) technique or formal abstraction like I was at the time. I was trying to engage with actual subject matter that ran a bit deeper than allegory or metaphor. So I took a page from many sculptors’ work that I was into, where one’s actual material and how one works with it influences or becomes the content and form of the work. I think it’s also rooted deeper in my background as a performing musician - like when I was younger, it was hard to just imagine sounds, or detach sound from its own physical experience, since in hindsight I was often the one tasked with that translation from idea into reality. It’s never neutral or abstract, really, it’s always some kind of energy transfer. So embracing that and getting into the nitty gritty of exactly how sound is made and what that can mean has been very fruitful. Over time it’s allowed me to work with a lot of different types of media/traditions/histories, and think much deeper about cultural expectations and contextual associations of something as seemingly abstract as sound.
What’s the story around the field recordings used in the piece?
If there’s a place that the music is tied to, I’ve found it crucial to actually spend time there if I can. So I usually take lots of recordings, which more times than not have led to compositional choices I never could’ve anticipated. It’s like how you can form your own ideas about something or somewhere, only to have very different reactions when you actually experience it. Sometimes the field recordings are untreated, almost photographic, like the birdsong that opens side B or the creaking metallic bird sculpture that ends the piece - both of those were recorded in downtown Niagara Falls, NY (which is seven kilometers up the river from a former settlement called Suspension Bridge). Others are less explicit: I found the music’s climax needed a super intense white noise sound to drown out the ensemble, and I had a recording I made from hanging some mics off the falls. One might not know that that is actually Niagara but I’d hope the trace of its intensity or purpose comes across.
This is a broad question, but how do text and titles interact with music for you?
I see them as part of the sound material catalog - they’re suggestions or references that might point a listener in certain directions, offering anchor points in ways that the sound might not quite get at. A lot of my titles are either quotations, impressions, or misremembered things I’ve seen, overheard, or read. I keep these in a bunch of notes on my phone, which is a good repository for collecting them and forgetting/finding them again later. In this project, the extra written essay/talk was exciting to unravel - a friend called it “academia in drag”, which I liked. Normally, if I’m lucky only 5% of the backend research makes it explicitly into a piece, usually through stylistic references or accompanying text/titles. It was interesting this time around to just expound on every little footnote within footnote of (mostly) every reference. It’s of course not essential at all to experience the music, but it builds out the scale of the piece that matches the ambition of the source material. Also, I generally love a good easter egg (or many dozens of them in this case).
Where did the title, when the great fires were lit on the other side of the ocean, come from?
It’s a line from W.G. Sebald’s ‘Rings of Saturn’, which is, grossly generalizing, a florid and tangential dérive up the English coastline. In addition to the book’s structure, I like Sebald’s actual language a lot, his syntax and wording feels like it has the weight of multiple meanings running at once, often finding distortions of scale hiding within the mundane. The way in which his writing falls into these rabbit holes of free association and entanglement, I feel an affinity with this in my own working process. I had it saved, and then when the piece started to come together, this phrase had a kind of magnetism and potential for meaning(s) that fit with the overall project.
Can you talk a little about the Irish music adapted in the piece? How do Irish music or musicians specifically fit into this music’s narrative?
There’s a few tangled threads there. One was an anecdote (of unknown accuracy) from this book Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology by David Nye, that when Edison was laying the first power lines in Manhattan, supposedly the contracted Irish laborers would refuse to work because they thought the devil hid in the wires. This image first really stuck with me. When I was thinking about opening the Pandora’s box of speculative historical “research” to accompany my actual research, I was really inspired by Jennifer Walshe’s Aisteach, her fictionalized historical record of Irish avant-garde art, replete with pages of pseudonyms, fake characters, musical examples, contrafacta, etc. It’s not overtly fantastical, as much of it is very plausible, but relies on the mystery cultivated by marginal events forgotten in the dusty archive or lost to obscure scholarly research. Around this time too I’d met Dylan Kerr in Berlin and we’d become friends - knowing they spoke Irish and were a fantastic sean-nos singer (among many other talents), I had the idea to make an old song together that wasn’t real, but could have been. Working on this let me also work with a more direct emotional narrative, but obscured by this similar sense of mystery and a language that very few people I knew could understand. So all of these threads came together to make this “artifact”, including some fictitious biographical material for Dylan and a wax cylinder that I, the composer, had “found”, and then set in my own music (in this case harmonized over the 60Hz hum and a choir of myself and Dylan intoning its harmonics).
And you did some research into connections between early 20th century hymnody and the pitches of electrical currents?
Oh, far too much. The seeds of the piece actually started with the history of how the power grid developed, especially how terminology like harmonics, phase, frequency could have meaning in such different contexts. I knew from then the piece would be more about the ‘electricity’ part of electronic music history, like digging into what actually happened so that we could even think of having a ‘history of electronic music’ in the first place. I’ve also long been interested in microtonal music and particularly ‘folk’ idioms that don’t conform to equal temperament, so imagining a kind of vernacularized version of Just Intonation rooted in the generator hum was a way to kind of embody the collision of these interests in a multifaceted musical object, similar to the Irish ballad. So, in a way the connections are ones that I’ve chosen or looked for, but the conditions that allowed for that particular fiction to make plausible sense are all very much rooted in historical record.
In live performance, there’s a section just before “The Spark” when Charlotte is laying a 300 foot XLR cable around the room....is she encircling the entire audience?
Yep, exactly. When we did it the first time, we also wrapped the loose 1/4in cable that she plays around the ensemble. I liked to imagine these loops of wire were forming their own transformer, maybe more for amplifying spiritual inductance than electrical…
Any strange coincidences or occurrences happen while you were delving into all these “tangled half-signs?”
I mean the big one was how so many of these ‘big’ figures in scientific history were just out of their minds according to our current sensibilities. I was always struck by how our conception of empiricism or rationality as ‘truth’ is actually more recent and constructed than we might think. It’s just another belief system, sure, but 100+ years ago you really felt that threshold of technical knowledge - people tinkering with things they dug up from the earth, mysterious solutions of organic matter, unseen forces, etc. It’s also like, we still don’t really know the deeper how or why behind something like electricity, even despite our proficiency with using it, there’s still some kind of unknowable magic there.
Listen to the music here : when the great fires were lit on the other side of the ocean
Release show in Berlin September 30th! :
Also, Coming Soon…
Sweet Wreath presents...
“The Folklore of Frogs”
A themed Audio-Visual show with Puppets, Art & Music by:
Common Earth Mineral is a bass & drums minimalist noise rock duo from Philadelphia
Vernal Scuzz is a freeform band from Birmingham who’ll be giving an experimental powerpoint presentation with music
Catsup Jubilee is a puppet show about cats, mutant amphibians & weird creatures from the Gulf Coast, featuring Jalousie Fernhuffer, Jeffica the Elephant, Fang Shui, Misty Regrets, and others!
September 26 at Make BHM
4000 3rd Ave S, Birmingham, AL 35222
Doors 6:30
Show 7-9pm
Free or by donation!
