"Sleeping On/ The Present", a Noam Bierstone concert

Upstream Music Association is excited to be supporting 'Sleeping On / The Present'  with Sam Salem, Weston Olencki & Noam Bierstone at Good Robot Brewing Company's Mouse Trap in Halifax as part of their tour of Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia!

'Sleeping On / The Present' is the culmination of a multi-year collaboration between percussionist Noam Bierstone, trombonist Weston Olencki, and composer/media artist Sam Salem, combining two new, ambitious long-form solo works for instruments, objects, live electronics, and video. Sleeping On / The Present explores time, distance, and the psychogeography of memory, reimagining the relationship between performer, electronics, media, and audience.

‘The Way Up & The Way Down’ (2023) explores and reinterprets Salem's own archive of materials and associated memories, repurposing a 12-string acoustic guitar as an augmented percussion instrument. Bierstone navigates a delicate and volatile setup of the work in an intimate, devotional space, drifting in and out of timelessness in a world where dreams of the past have replaced visions of the future.

In ‘Bury Me Deep’ (2022), Olencki forms a duet, a kind of seance, between their present self and an AI model created from a comprehensive database of over 3000 recordings of their performance techniques made specifically for this project. A suspended trombone reincarnates the disembodied acousmatic sound world of the piece, which moves from the present to the past, from snapshots of South Carolina to AI-mediated footage of a Drum Corp competition. A ghostly choreography, Bury Me Deep is Southern Gothic in the age of the Machine.