Today, we're putting The Tonearm's needle on guitarist and composer Sam Wenc.
Wenc is a Philadelphia-based artist who has spent nearly a decade building one of the more distinctive bodies of work in American experimental music, mostly under the name Post Moves.
Now he's released his first album under his own name. It's called Language at an Angle, and it came out on Lobby Art Editions in January. The record grew out of a year of live performances—from Philadelphia to Japan—and it captures Sam doing something specific with pedal steel guitar: striking it, bowing it, treating it as both a sound source and a physical object. The result sits somewhere between drone, jazz, and a kind of American folk music you can't quite place.
Sam's here to walk us through the record, his move to Philadelphia, and what it means to finally put his own name on the work.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Sam Wenc's Language at an Angle)
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