Roulette’s annual Mixology Festival highlights novel approaches to technology in music and media arts, since 1991, and is supported in-part by mediaThe Foundation.
DAY 3 of Roulette’s 2026 Mixology Festival includes a double bill of composer/electronic musician Nicolas Collins with Ben Neill on trumpet, and Berlin-based experimental musician and artist Weston Olencki with special guest (TBA).
Nicolas Collins presents Semi-Conducting, recent works for unstable systems, with circuits & software, feedback & players, video and a woodpecker—with guest Ben Neill on trumpet. Works include: Down On The Roof (2023, for woodpecker and percussion), Long Fetch (2022, for feedback and trumpet), !trumpet (2021, for speaker-loaded trumpet and chaotic software), and Roll, Pitch & Yaw (2022, for solo performer with electromagnetic feedback).
Weston Olencki and [guest] present with sharp bitter lines, which is at its core a set of songs, mostly about loss, coal, and emigration, that trace the unruly tethers between Ireland and Appalachia. Written and performed by Berlin-based artists Weston Olencki and [guest], it draws upon their shared interest in the spaces between experimental sound, multichannel synthesis, and vernacular musics. Drawing on the work of folklorists Dolores Keane and Jean Ritchie, with sharp bitter lines uses digital string synthesis, voice, an Appalachian mountain dulcimer, and a talkbox to reimagine the future lineages of the ballad tradition.
The work is made from the following traditional tunes: Green Grows the Laurel, Two Sisters, Sliabh Geal gCua na Féile, The Shoofly, and Shady Grove.
“Whether it’s using machine learning to extend the permutations of bluegrass tunes, composing speculative multimedia pieces about electrical folklores, or test the material limits of acoustic instruments, Weston Olencki’s music reflects a fascination with how musical traditions evolve through and with the cultures around them.” –The Wire
“…a wild, exhilarating, disturbing picture of our pixelated times…” –LA Times
A livestream will be available free of charge at 8pm on the day of the performance and archived for future viewing.
New York born and raised, Nicolas Collins spent most of the 1990s in Europe, where he was Artistic Director of STEIM (Amsterdam), and a DAAD composer-in-residence in Berlin. For many years he was a Professor in the Department of Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Editor-in-Chief of the Leonardo Music Journal, and is currently a Research Fellow at the Orpheus Institute (Ghent). An early adopter of microcomputers for live performance, Collins also makes use of homemade electronic circuitry and conventional acoustic instruments. His book, “Handmade Electronic Music – The Art of Hardware Hacking” (Routledge), now in its third edition, has influenced emerging electronic music worldwide. His memoir, “Semi-Conducting- Rambles Through the Post-Cagean Thicket”, was released by Bloomsbury in 2025. (This will be Collins’ first New York appearance since 2019.)
Ben Neill is a composer/performer who plays the Mutantrumpet, a hybrid electro-acoustic instrument of his own design. He is recognized as a musical innovator who “uses a schizophrenic trumpet to create art music for the people” (Wired Magazine).
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), Märzmusik, Black Mountain College, philharmonie luxembourg, HKW, Festival Musica, the American Academy in Rome, Roulette Intermedium, Jalopy Theatre, Fylkingen, Pioneer Works, and more. They have held guest residencies at the University of Huddersfield, Harvard, NYU, Columbia, Princeton, Stanford, Northwestern, and have been a visiting artist at CalArts (2018), Stoveworks (2023), suddenlyLISTEN (2024), and EMS Stockholm (2025).
Their solo discography includes Verd Mont (SUPERPANG, 2021), Old Time Music (Tripticks Tapes, 2022), pearls ground down to powder (Full Spectrum, 2024), I went to the dance (Longform Editions, 2024) and Broadsides (Outside Time, 2025), with other recording projects released by PAGANS, Dinzu Artefacts, Lobby Art, Astral Spirits, Out of Your Head, Sound American, HatHut, and Astral Spirits. They are an active member of RAGE THORMBONES and APPARAT, and perform in many contexts on low brass instruments, winds, banjo, and electronics.
[guest] is an artist from Ireland working between sound and performance. They create durational, site-specific, endurance-based performances shaped by the environments they inhabit. Their work is a dialogue between the voice, the body, and space, exploring what is inscribed in a location’s resonance and history, and how these elements are transduced and embodied through their performance.
