Weston Olencki

Old Number Four is a slack-key dirge written for the first commercially-produced electric string instrument, a 1937 Rickenbacker "Frying Pan" lap steel guitar. Grown from the rich soil of the Mississippi Delta, Old Number Four is an oblique sequel to Broadsides, which rethreads the quilt-like complexity of the American South into a more taut, industrial form. Central to the work is the mythology of John Henry, a cautiously heroic symbol of human struggling against machine, whose story has been destined to spend eternity in a song. In the piece, the empty resonances of the Lewis Tunnel coldly ring against a bevy of electromagnetic resonators and tactile distortion units; a thundering coal freighter emergency brakes to a population of 12 in Prince, West Virginia. Pitted against this ancient modern instrument, a makeshift "Devil's Fiddle" coarsely saws itself from within the noise of a bespoke neural synthesizer, extracting crude data and corrupting the music it emerges from. The work is, in a way, reaching back through time before the phenomenon of "Rock & Roll" could have been imagined, spinning out its futuristic resonances into the backroads of the Delta's floodplain. In all my speculations about the past century, I had to see with my own eyes where the Southern cross the Dog.

For a 1937 Rickenbacker Electro A-22 “Frying Pan” lapsteel guitar, custom electromagnetic resonators, switchblade, motorized rail ties, contact microphone, wooden train whistle, homemade diddley bow, $1 bill, steel wool, miner’s scrip coin, tactile distortion unit, shoebox tape deck, rewired tweeters, and seven-channel audio. Too many bits of sampled audio to even go into it.

Field recordings taken in the trainyards of Jackson, Mississippi & Irondale, Alabama, and in many locations throughout the Mississippi/Arkansas Delta. Side B train collision recorded live in Prince, West Virginia. Additional geophone recordings made inside the Lewis Tunnel in Allegheny, Virginia and the Big Bend Tunnel in Talcott, West Virginia.

“Devil’s Fiddle” RAVE model compiled from a library of sounds graciously provided by Austin Larkin, Mari Maurice (More Eaze), Jessie Marino, Marina Kifferstein, and Weston Olencki.

Additional thanks to Jo David Meyer Lysne and NOTAM for beta-testing yr amazing resonator unit, and to Mattie Barbier for letting me make a mess of the shop at the Museum.

First performance October 16, 2026 at Three Skies Festival (Köln, DE)

LP coming in 2027.

| 01: 00035404_n_fields_swannanoa_tunnel_1937.wav

| 02: oxbow // High Water Everywhere, pt. 3

| 03: you rang it red

| 04: Old Number Four