Weston Olencki - Broadsides

Weston Olencki
Broadsides
Outside Time
USA, 2025
LP

Jaw-dropping LP presenting an exploded view of American folk music, manipulating its raw materials with electronic processing to create a beautiful, overwhelming post-modern quilt. Field recordings of freight trains, running water, chirping insects, and ticking clocks provide the throughline of an abstracted journey while traditional instruments accumulate uncanniness, like the swarm of processed banjo plucks that overtake “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” like a plague of locusts.

I can’t say I’ve heard America taken apart this radically in music. The closest I can think of is certain experiences in the theater, where playwrights like Suzan-Lori Parks and Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins have found disquieting ways to unpick our self-mythologies and stitch them up so we can see the ugly seams again. In terms of recorded music, I can only imagine Harry Smith taking a dramatically different path and making heady concrète out of the records he collected instead of cataloguing them so faithfully (if idiosyncratically).

This is not always an easy listen, but it’s meticulously constructed and often gorgeous. The Washington D.C. label Outside Time has been putting out some fascinating work from the outset, and with their first leap from cassette to vinyl, they’ve given us an LP to sit with for a good long while.