On The Mortgage Burn, Weston Olencki and Bascaille turn percussion, objects, and unstable acoustics into something both ritualistic and unruly, where sound seems built from friction, resonance, and patient sabotage. Tom Jacques, Antoine Létourneau Berger, and Noam Bierstone meet Olencki’s appetite for vernacular disassembly with a dense, tactile language of struck surfaces, scraped textures, and lopsided pulse, making the record feel as physical as it is abstract. It is a thrillingly strange set of collective sound making, full of raw detail and sly structural intelligence, where every clang, rattle, and hum feels both accidental and inevitable.
'keep it close to the floor' is a landscape comprised of tuned fiddles, homemade zithers, local, watershed debris, dried pulse, speaker cones, vibration motors, mallets, bows, an upright piano, an acoustic guitar, and a quadrophonic speaker array adhered to the instruments. The title is taken from the “Miramichi Dictionary”, Doug Underhill’s colloquial lexicon of Atlantic Canada. ‘keep it close to the floor’ is what you tell the fiddle player when you like what they’re playing and that they shouldn’t stop for anything.
Reel de Rimouski is an extended rendition of the Québécois tune ‘Reel de Rimouski’, as popularized by Ti-Jean Carignan. It is made with four fiddles and granular electronic processing.
Bascaille is Tom Jacques, Antoine Létourneau-Berger, and Noam Bierstone. All compositions by Weston Olencki, performed by the quartet. Recorded by Tom Jacques October 2024 in Rimouski, Québec. Mixed and finalized by Weston Olencki.