Railton McCowen Olencki

Lucy Railton:
Born in London and based in Berlin, Lucy Railton is a cellist who works in composition, improvisation and electronic music. She is involved in the presentation of works by Maryanne Amacher, Iannis Xenakis and Morton Feldman and music using Just Intonation; her engagement with this repertoire has occasioned extensive explorations of resonance, rational intonation and psychoacoustics, preoccupations that are ever present in her own work. Her recent collaborators include Rebecca Salvadori, Farida Amadou, Catherine Lamb, Kali Malone, Khyam Allami, Stephen O’Malley and Max Eilbacher, and she has participated in projects with Pauline Oliveros, Matmos, and Mary Jane Leach, among others. Railton established the Kammer Klang series at Cafe OTO, which ran for 10 years, and co-founded and co-directed the London Contemporary Music Festival from 2013-2016.

John McCowen:
John McCowen’s musical life has become an obsession with discovering a polyphonic language on a historically monophonic instrument – the clarinet. This path has led him to a unique acoustic vocabulary that is akin to an ever-shifting soundscape of electronic feedback. John’s multiphonic approach embraces drones, difference and combinatorial tones, and beating harmonics as a means to showcase the compositional potential within a single, acoustic sound source. His work has been described by The New Yorker as “the sonic equivalent of microscopic life viewed on a slide” and “an astonishing demonstration of pure sound and human will” by The Wire. Recorded documents of this practice have been released by Edition Wandelweiser, International Anthem, Astral Spirits, and others – with upcoming released on Black Truffle, Hallow Ground, Kou Records, and GRM/Shelter Press. John has been Artist-in-Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, ISSUE Project Room, & Lijiang Studio. John has collaborated extensively with the founder of The Art Ensemble of Chicago and member of the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), Roscoe Mitchell. He has orchestrated, arranged, and transcribed Mitchell’s works for orchestras and other ensembles, as well as performing as a duo of bass saxophone and contrabass clarinet. He has performed at Radio France (FR), Edition Festival (SE), Borealis Festival (NO), Jazzfestival Saalfelden (AT), Cafe OTO (UK), Sequences Festival (IS), Dark Music Days Festival (IS), Roulette Intermedium, LAMPO, ISSUE Project Room, Q-O2 Oscillation Festival (BE), and others. His writings have been published in Sound American. He currently lives in Reykjavík, Iceland – where he is artistic director of the experimental arts space, Mengi.

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), Black Mountain College, Philharmonie Luxembourg, HKW, Festival Musica, kalvfestivalen, the American Academy in Rome, Roulette Intermedium, Jalopy Theatre, Frequency Festival, Pioneer Works, and was awarded the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis from the 2016 Darmstadt Ferienkurse. Various recording projects have been released by HatHut, Sound American, Full Spectrum, New Amsterdam, Clean Feed, Longform Editions, Dinzu Artefacts, Superpang, Tripticks Tapes, Kairos, Lobby Art, Sound Holes, Astral Spirits, Pagans, Out of Your Head, and more. They are an active member of Rage Thormbones and Apparat, and perform in many contexts on low brass instruments, winds, banjo, and electronics. They also run events and sound at KM28.

lucy railton
john mccowen
weston olencki

Tourdates

No shows booked at the moment.