Weston Olencki - Broadsides

American composer and sound artist Weston Olencki's latest collection provides a mesmerising meditation on traditional song, time-refracted interpretation and memory-based storytelling that shifts understandings of 'folk' into new spaces. Just as 2022's Old Time Music passed Appalachian music through the prism of avant-garde composition, Broadsides was conceived while Olencki travelled the American South in pursuit of its traditions and inspirations. The results are both vivid and uncanny, folk song layered, looped and reimagined into different forms, the ghosts of history and tradition trapped inside themselves, simultaneously expressing their roots while venturing new branching pathways towards the sun. Sonically they are mostly very different, but conceptually you might link Broadsides with the approach of someone like The Caretaker or even Läuten der Seele, hanging sound, song and memory together in historicist amber, especially on the closing eight minute reconfiguring of murder ballad 'Omie Wise' that's build palimpsetically from 14 different versions of the songs dilated and overlaid. I'm tempted to call it future primitive, though there's actually little that primitive about the source material of folk song - it's often the various basis of our communication. What Olencki seems to do best is lovingly frame that very idea in evocative, forward-thinking ways. 
 
FFO: The Caretaker, Jim O'Rourke, Bill Orcutt, Läuten der Seele