Loping / gestures by Mark Trecka

To celebrate the Spring Equinox, Beacon Sound welcomes New York-based musician Mark Trecka to the label. This is the second in our series of Solstice and Equinox cassette releases to mark the seasonal cycle.

'Loping / gestures' is a collaged arc of song and sound which includes, among other elements: a longform collaboration with Chaz Prymek (Lake Mary/Fuubutsushi) and contemporary dance ensemble A-Y/dancers; a piece created in 2018 which ritually acknowledges and tends to the dead; a song that Trecka wrote, recorded and previously released in the early 2000s; an excerpt from a recent live collaboration between Trecka and Chacon; and a piece of music created from a beautiful and elegiac mbira recording that jaimie branch, in the year before her death, sent to Trecka as a contribution to “Correspondences as Shelter”. Trecka includes that piece here with love and deepest respect for his nearly 20-year friendship with branch, who the world tragically lost last year. Also included in this mix are very recent recordings which functionally and playfully gesture toward future projects.

This is Trecka's first solo release since 2021’s 'Implication', a record that was selected as among Bandcamp’s Best Experimental releases. Marc Masters wrote that 'Implication' was made of “pieces that feel both composed and unrestricted. The result has a memory-drenched aura.”

Further exploring such an aura and defying easy classification, 'Loping / gestures' is maybe better thought of as a mix tape than an album, replete with the nostalgia, tenderness, and acknowledgment of friendships often associated with that form. The piece avowedly takes cues from “Correspondences as Shelter” –– the ongoing, experimental radio show that Trecka developed for Raven Chacon’s Radio Coyote project and which Trecka now broadcasts bi-monthly on Radio al Hara.

Note: the full version of 'Gesture Through' is only available on the B side of the cassette edition. The digital track presented here is a segment of music from the full piece.

"I first put this mix together as an autumn-into-winter project, thinking of the dead and thinking of companionships and friendships both gone and ongoing. I needed badly to do and be done with something. Andrew from Beacon Sound heard it and proposed that he release it on the spring equinox which at first struck me as antithetical to the spirit in which it was developed but which I quickly came to see as meaningful in ways that are bigger than me. Anyway, we all labor so much and so long. And so I shaped this thing in a deliberately off-the-cuff fashion, over and against laboring so much and so long. But I did this largely out of some sounds and works which are perennial. Madeline Johnston played a very old song of mine on her NTS radio show and I was so moved that I opted to include it here. Tender gestures. So it is, the whole thing itself, perennial. And tender. I wrote this about one of the tracks but I think it rather well describes the whole thing: ‘Like the dead, every element in the piece has either appeared elsewhere or will eventually. Like other related traditions, it is made to ward or welcome, maybe variously."
– Mark Trecka 03/20/23

Mark Trecka is a singer, sound artist, and writer.

"Fool Signals" is his latest full-length.

Trecka has collaborated with Midwife, Cinder (Cindytalk), Susan Alcorn, Raven Chacon, Sam Skarstad (Yellow Eyes), A-Y/dancers, Audra Wolowiec, Drekka, Walt McClements, Chaz Prymek (Lake Mary) and others. He founded Pillars and Tongues in 2007 and is co-founder of the Beacon Prison Books Project.

mtrecka.com