Weston Olencki / Cassia Streb
Friday June 12 | doors at 7:30pm | performance at 8:00pm
$15 ADVANCE tickets | $20 DAY OF SHOW | $10 STUDENT tickets with ID | always pay what you can
Weston Olencki performing prepared autoharp and electromechanical banjo plus an opening set from Cassia Streb for viola, found objects, and small speakers
In support of their latest LP Broadsides (2025), Weston Olencki will perform a two-part solo set on prepared autoharp and electromechanical banjo. Building on their work in Verd Mont (2021) and Old Time Music (2022), Broadsides distills down a long journey made through the American South, weaving together folkloric abstraction and autobiographical memory into a rich sonic quilt. The work features an interpretation of the bluegrass standard “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” which captures this euphoria of melancholy in motion. Here, the tonalities of old-time are smeared and stretched until all that’s audible is the insistence that Heaven might be real.
Cassia Streb presents a solo performance for viola, found objects, small percussion, and distributed speakers playing field recordings collected during recent residencies in Southwestern Utah and Sea Ranch on the Northern California coast. Wind, distant aircraft, stones, surf, and shifting environmental textures move through the space alongside live interventions made with bowed strings and everyday materials. Rather than treating the room as a neutral container, the set folds the surrounding environment into the performance itself, allowing incidental sounds and acoustic reflections to become part of the piece. Sounds emerge, disappear, mask one another and create unstable points between recognition and abstraction. The performance asks listeners to continually reorient their attention. What begins as a piece slowly becomes an exercise in noticing.
Weston Olencki
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).
Cassia Streb
Cassia Streb is a sound artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She writes music for specific situations and for special places. Her compositions are often created for friends and colleagues in order to highlight aspects of their musicality that she admires. Cassia plays viola, small percussion instruments and found objects in her work with improvisation and interpretation of notated scores. Some of her recent projects include creating sound installations with Tim Feeney for the desert, a coastal city, a port overlook, a stairwell, and a storefront. Cassia’s work as a curator of experimental sound and art can be found through Music for Your Inbox and Tapetail at Automata.