Weston Olencki + Henry Birdsey

Name: Weston Olencki + Henry Birdsey
Start: 2025-10-24T19:30:00-04:00
Location: Epsilon Spires

Schedule

Fri, 24 Oct, 2025 at 07:30 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

Epsilon Spires | Brattleboro, VT

Friday, October 24th, Doors 7:30pm. Berlin-based sound artist Weston Olencki’s electromechanical banjo interpretation of bluegrass standards capture the euphoria of melancholy in motion. Stretching the tonalities of old-time until all that’s audible is the insistence that Heaven might be real... Opening performance by Henry Birdsey.
Henry Birdsey is a composer and musician from Vermont. He plays the pedal steel, lap steel, and bagpipes. Current bands and projects include Tongue Depressor, Old Saw, Formant, and Trespass Field.
Weston Olencki is an artist and musician from South Carolina, living now in Berlin. Their projects position musical instruments as sites of cultural inscription, working fluidly between experimental sound, traditional musics, and their various space/time(s). Weston has previously performed at the Borealis Festival, Counterflows, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Lampo, Musica Nova (as a soloist with the Helsinki Philharmonic), Märzmusik, Black Mountain College, philharmonie luxembourg, HKW, Festival Musica, the American Academy in Rome, Roulette Intermedium, Jalopy Theatre, Fylkingen, Pioneer Works, and more. They have 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), suddenlyLISTEN (2024), and EMS Stockholm (2025).
Their solo discography includes Verd Mont (SUPERPANG, 2021), Old Time Music (Tripticks Tapes, 2022), pearls ground down to powder (Full Spectrum, 2024), I went to the dance (Longform Editions, 2024) and Broadsides (Outside Time, 2025), with other recording projects released by PAGANS, Dinzu Artefacts, Lobby Art, Astral Spirits, Out of Your Head, Sound American, HatHut, and Astral Spirits. They are an active member of RAGE THORMBONES and APPARAT, and perform in many contexts on low brass instruments, winds, banjo, and electronics.
As a part of their LP release tour for Broadsides (Outside Time, 2025), Weston will perform a set on electromechanical banjo. Building on their work in Verd Mont (SUPERPANG, 2021) and Old TIme Music (Tripticks Tapes, 2022), Olencki’s interpretation of the bluegrass standard “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” captures the euphoria of melancholy in motion. The permutational plucks of banjo are bounced around the frame by a computer, its pitches determined within algorithmic sequences and transcriptions of classic three-finger licks. Accompanied by the motoric percussion and humid summer field recordings, the tonalities of old-time are smeared and stretched until all that’s audible is the insistence that Heaven might be real.