Cleek Schrey is a 2022 Resident Artist
Organs is a meditation on our various organs: musical, liturgical, historical, corporeal, mechanical, metaphorical. Desiccated and discarded technology reanimated for the production of physical and metaphysical resonance. Cleek Schrey and Weston Olencki perform original compositions and old music on a collection of historic pump organs from the early 20th century built by the Estey Organ Co. of Brattleboro, VT.
Cleek Schrey: organ, violin, electronics
Weston Olencki: organ, electronics
Featuring guests Henry Fraser (bass), and Gamin (saenghwang), Nora Brown (banjo)
Described by the Irish Times as “a musician at one with his instrument and his music,” Cleek Schrey is a fiddler, composer, and filmmaker from Virginia, now based in NYC. He plays a range of instruments including the hardanger d’amore, a violin with sympathetic strings, and the daxophone, a wooden idiophone designed by Hans Reichel. Recent engagements include the Big Ears Festival (TN), the Kilkenny Arts Festival (IR), SuperSense Festival of the Ecstatic (Aus) and Issue Project Room (NYC). Frequent collaborators include electronic music pioneer David Behrman, the viol da gamba player Liam Byrne, traditional fiddle icon Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, and composer Alvin Lucier. The journal Sound Post has noted that Schrey “possesses a rare combination of traits: deep respect for traditional music and the people who make it, and an unbounded curiosity about new directions for sound.” He was a 2021 Pioneer Works Sound Artist-in-Residence on Governors Island and is currently a Resident Artist at Roulette.
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.
This work was developed as part of Cleek Schrey’s Roulette 2021 Residency, made possible with funds provided by the Jerome Foundation. This performance is presented through Roulette’s GENERATE program, providing over 30 artists each year with in-depth creative and technical support.
