Weston Olencki, Webb Crawford, and Victoria Cheah
weston olencki
webb crawford
Victoria Cheah
tuesday, october 21, 2025 at 8pm
Goethe-Institut Boston
170 Beacon Street, Boston
Music: 8pm (Doors: 7:30pm)
Admission: $15 general | $10 for students and Non-Event members
No one turned away for lack of funds
For information about accessibility call the Goethe-Institut Boston at 617-610-9398 . Questions about tickets, contact susanna@nonevent.org.
Non-Event and the Goethe-Institut Boston present an evening of experimental composition and free improvisation from Berlin, Boston, and Western Mass..
About the Artists
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.
Webb Crawford is a guitarist and instrument-builder. They play free-improvised music, Piedmont-style fingerpicking, and percussive/noisy stuff. They’ve built stringed instruments ranging from electric guitars, basses and mandolins to modern reconstructions of historical instruments and instruments made from repurposed materials or found objects.
In 2017, they worked with the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art to restore the instruments of Gunnar Schonbeck as part of an interactive exhibit. They built replicas of Schonbeck’s “Triangular cellos” for Bennington College, and have taught instrument-building workshops at The Cooper Union, Connecticut College, and the Bennington Museum. They also work as a guitar repair technician.
Victoria Cheah is a composer whose work concerns boundaries, transitions, sustained effort, and intimacies within social-performance rituals. Her work has been commissioned and/or featured by ensembles and presenters including Talujon, Either/Or, Non-Event, Switch Ensemble, Line Upon Line, Han Chen, andPlay, Yarn/Wire, Wavefield Ensemble, MATA Festival, Guerilla Opera, Ensemble Dal Niente, Vertixe Sonora, Marilyn Nonken, PRISM Quartet, and performed by others. Recordings of their music can be found on Dinzu Artefacts, New Focus Recordings, and XAS Records. Cheah currently serves as Assistant Professor at Berklee College of Music and Boston Conservatory, as well as Director of Production of Talea Ensemble.
From 2011-2015, Cheah served as the founding executive director of Boston new music sinfonietta Sound Icon. She has worked with ensembles and festivals including Composers Conference, Manhattan Sinfonietta, Argento Chamber Ensemble, Composit Festival, and Cantata Profana towards the realization of contemporary music events in New York, Boston (USA) and Rieti (IT). Previously, Cheah has taught music, research, and writing related courses as an instructor at Longy School of Music, Brandeis University, and as a teaching fellow at Harvard University. As a composer, she has attended academies including Sommerakademie Schloss Solitude, Darmstadt, Fontainebleau, VIPA, SICPP, The Walden School, and others. Cheah holds a B.A. in music from City University of New York Hunter College (Macaulay Honors College) and a Ph.D. in music composition & theory from Brandeis University.
