Weston Olencki - When the great fires… [LP]

Release Date: September 30, 2026 ‘When the great fires were lit on the other side of the ocean’ is the first collaborative album written and developed by Berlin-based composer Weston Olencki and NYC’s TAK ensemble. Borrowing its title from the psychogeographical excursions of W.G. Sebald, when the great fires… takes its own journey through real and imagined histories of electricity, using myriad perspectives and mythologies around electrical force to re-enchant its ubiquitous presence throughout our recent past. Fantastical philosophies and prophecies around electricity were central to the belief systems of early sound recording innovators, the eschatological prophecies of the Spiritualists, and complex political players central to the founding of our current age. This particular era and its manifold perspectives about this new “endless” source of power allowed individuals from a wide array of social strata to explore their visions and fears of the immanent modernity – a time of intense introspection on the precipice of a fundamentally changing world. The musical settings are as varied as their source materials: slow-burning, mesmeric drones constructed from the harmonics of the 60Hz ground hum, crackling textures of the electromagnetic ether, field recordings taken at Nikola Tesla's first AC power plant in Niagara Falls, and a speculative contrafactum of old Irish sean-nós balladry. Part chamber ensemble composition, part conceptual research obsession, when the great fires… grows from the possibilities of ‘what could have happened’ as much as dusty archival records, pulling the listener inside this teeming interconnected narrative across centuries and disciplines. In addition to the vinyl (designed by Sweet Wreath), bonus materials include a densely footnoted article on the work’s source material, originally given as a lecture by scholar A. Gilbert Williamson in 2054 at Roulette Intermedium, and a professionally printed & bound copy of Olencki’s handwritten score.