Tripticks Tapes Presents: SIBILANTS #1

Nat Baldwin will read from his new book The Red Barn

Nat Baldwin/ Jake Meginsky duo

Mary Staubitz/ Arkm Foam/ VIc Rawlings Trio

Weston Olencki

THE RED BARN by NAT BALDWIN

The Red Barn is a small book of short fiction originally released by Calamari Archive, Ink in 2017. The book-on-tape version was recorded 5 years later, co-released by Calamari and Tripticks Tapes. The recording features excerpts from the text, four of the longer stories, each alongside two panned tracks of double bass improvisations. All performances are first and only takes without edits.

"The album is a hellscape with no equal – it is my first encounter with a work in the classical/experimental space that attains actual horror. Usually, as time passes I think about any given piece I’ve heard less and less. But The Red Barn has lodged itself in a corner of my mind, churning, marinating, and pointing to buried expectations that we’ve accepted about music, its functions, and its socially acceptable narrative limits.”—Anna Heflin, from the review on Which Sinfonia

“In The Red Barn, Nat Baldwin decomposes narrative's safe spaces. The symbols in the nightmare landscape are nothing other than themselves. Nails. Boards. Tubs. Chains. Buckets. Teeth. A story of boys is stripped sentence by sentence. What's left is the brutal music of language laid bare.”—Joanna Ruocco

“The blades, the rust, the dirt, the mouth, the meat, the blood, the sun, the glass, the skin, the word, the lake, the graves; it’s a pristine and elemental form of fiction that Nat Baldwin renders, distilling language and image to its most primal animation. Like seeing slides of color pass before your face in darkness. Like remembering how to read.”—Blake Butler

Nat Baldwin

Nat Baldwin is a musician and writer from Maine, currently living in Western Mass. He's released numerous solo and collaborative works and runs the experimental music label Tripticks Tapes.His first book The Red Barn was published by Calamari Archive, Ink in 2017. His most recent releases include a book-on-tape version of The Red Barn, with double bass accompaniment; Blind Field, a multitracked recording for double bass ensemble; and Phase Planes, a collaboration with guitarist E. Jason Gibbs. The debut release of his duo project with Stella Silbert is forthcoming later this year from Notice Recordings.

"Old Time Music" by Westen Olencki

Following the conceptual avant-hillbilly trajectory of their previous SUPERPANG release "Verd Mont", "Old Time Music" is composer/improviser Weston Olencki’s newest collection of historically-driven sound works. The album’s three pieces are rooted in the specific intersections between musical instruments, their associated genres, and broader cultural/material histories: the tenor saxophone with jazz and recording studio technology (tenor madness), the banjo with bluegrass and the mechanized modernism of the Carolinas (a vine that grew over the city…), and the pump organ with Sacred Harp hymnody and the aging marble industries of Olencki’s home in Vermont (Charon guiding the weary…). “Old Time Music” explores just that: sound that binds itself to remembrance, futurism, (nonlinear) time, and the living musical traditions of America.

Weston Olencki is a musician, composer, and sound artist. Their current work is centered around questions of instrumental music and its contexts/constructs, various mediated practices of listening and improvisation, and the technological, material, and cultural histories of rural space/time.

Weston has performed and presented work at the Borealis Festival, ISSUE Project Room, REDCAT, bludenzer tage zeitgemäßer musik, Ghent Jazz Festival, Blanton Museum of Art, philharmonie luxembourg, Squeaky Wheel, Festival Musica, kalvfestivalen, the American Academy in Rome, Roulette Intermedium, Frequency Festival, Indexical, and the OPTION series, and was awarded the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis from the 2016 Darmstadt Ferienkurse.

Various recording projects have been released by HatHut, Not Two, Sound American, Carrier, New Amsterdam, Clean Feed, Anticausal Systems, Dinzu Artefacts, SUPERPANG, Notice, Creative Sources, Out of Your Head, and their first solo brass release SOLO WORKS, which featured on Bandcamp Daily’s Best Experimental Music of 2020. They are an active member of RAGE THORMBONES, Ensemble Pamplemousse, the Wet Ink Large Ensemble, and perform regularly as a soloist and ensemble member on low brass instruments, handbuilt contraptions, and various electronic media. They currently live on occupied, unceded land of the Abenaki Nation, in what is known today as Brattleboro, Vermont.