for instruments

for instruments is Weston Olencki’s personal reflection on their recent instrumental music. Beginning with formative experiences in a Southern drum corps, Olencki traces their path from trombonist to composer, a turn that opened up new ideas about the relationship between performers, instruments, and their historical contexts.

They argue that instruments are more than tools for making music; instruments are sites of cultural inscription—charged objects shaped by, and shaping, the bodies, traditions, and technologies that engage with them.

In 2020 Olencki moved from New York City to Vermont. They describe how rural life brought back memories of their South Carolina childhood and prompted questions around regionalism and nostalgia. It also led them to consider how folk practices might intersect with experimental forms, such as reimagining bluegrass as a kind of algorithmic system.

The essay is rounded out by a review of works from 2020–2025 for antique organs, banjos, saxophones, fiddles, and marching-band percussion—often animated by electro-mechanical or computer-controlled processes. Here, meaning emerges both from the physicality of sound and from the stories embedded in the things that produce it.

Part material history, part autobiography, for instruments resists singular narratives, embracing ambivalence, instability, and the entanglement of past and present. Olencki’s music moves fluidly across disciplines, geographies, and temporalities, rejecting fixed categories in favor of a practice that, in their words, seeks the “tethers in between.”

Weston Olencki is a musician and composer based in Berlin.

Specifications

• 36 pages
• 5.5 x 8.5 inches
• Saddle-stitched; risograph
• Edition of 150
• March 2025