The clarinetist sits in a stackable chair on the chancel of a Queens church in winter. Eyes closed, cheeks puffed, instrument angled downward, knees straight, perfect posture, no wasted movement. Their deliberate de-emphasis on the “self” cuts a figure of someone with a heightened sensitivity of their body in space, but also a sacred ritual that suits the stained glass altar behind them. Their presence suggests both a patient silhouette in the waiting room of a government building and a monastic figure pursuing ego death.

Then THAT sound lets loose. Dense particles spray from every direction, unfurling into a volatile sustain that resembles the complex, woody blend of a concrete grinder, a Viper car alarm, and the squall of Marshall half-stacks engulfed by flames. I couldn’t stop laughing, but it was the convulsive laughter of disbelief and delight and terror of having my sympathetic nervous system flooded by a threat that was also an act of kindness (or vice versa).

Our ears register THAT sound but not its source. It’s unclear if the perpetrator of the exquisite violation sits before me. They’re there and not there but where is there? In the flesh, this lovely, disorienting shriek tears through your body and pulverizes your being. It does not coerce so much as gently invite you to vibrate with ecstatic instability for as long as you can tolerate, then opens you up to the possibility of going a bit further in the spirit of pleasurable transgressions/transgressive pleasures.

This past September, Madison Greenstone released “Resonance Studies in Ecstatic Consciousness,” which represents the apotheosis of an era of their extraordinary solo practice. Here is a conversation between Madison and Weston Olencki that took place in Berlin on November 10, 2023. Edited and condensed for clarity.

Madison Greenstone: I was really interested in creating a specific way of playing the instrument where I could be in dialogue with something emergent and outside of myself, but also part. I was really attracted to this tension of being a part yet also outside, and the migration between these states.

There was a point 10 years ago where I reading a bit of Lacan, and thinking about his concept of the other, but it all got mashed up in my brain, or perhaps misunderstood. So, being able to inhabit and recognize something other, but which is also close and part of you, but then in folding back spawns something new.

This was all around the time when I was living in Cologne and didn’t know a lot of folks to play music with. I was messing around with multiphonics so that the pitches (and myself) would have another entity to interact with, so they wouldn’t be ‘lonely.’

Weston Olencki: You’re putting the agency in the interaction between you and the instrument, which you steward and shape. You are experiencing it at the same time that everybody else is – you just happen to be the train driver. You’re still riding the train just as much as the passengers are. You offer these perspectives that are technically quite static, but sonically extremely volatile. So, we have the offloading of one’s agency in a way where you’re not in complete control of the instrument, but you’re in dialogue with it as the fundamental material.

Then there’s this tension between something that can be conceived of as extremely rigid. Correct me if I’m wrong, but a lot of them are a single fingering or a pattern. Then it’s all of the ways these extreme dynamic gestures come out of what is essentially stasis, so there’s this tension there between volatility and a kind of stoicism, too. How do you actually make one of these from the ground up?

MG: When I was first starting to work on these, I was doing a lot of reading and writing about Éliane Radigue, specifically “Naldjorlak,” the major cello piece for Charles Curtis.

WO: Right, this was all of the wolf tone research.

MG: Exactly! I was writing a lot about the wolf tone, or ‘wolfing action’ as a mechanical feedback paradigm within the instrument, acting as a self-generative state.

Wolfing action happens when the body of the cello sympathetically resonates at its fundamental frequency with a pitch that is being bowed. It creates complex interference patterns throughout the instrument, audible ‘warbling’ which a listener perceives as the wolf ‘tone,’ as well as changing the feel of playing the instrument. Usually, this only occurs within a given frequency range of the instrument.

But with “Naldjorlak,” every tunable component of the cello is adjusted so that when it’s played, the cello’s ‘natural’ playing state is that it’s just wolfing. Paraphrasing a lot here, but the piece is the tuning is the performance, and creates these generative states and energy flow through mechanical feedback.

An interesting parallel: a wolf tone eliminator functions in the same way as a tuned mass damper (pendulum) in very tall buildings to offset the effects of high winds – both oscillate in the opposite phase relation to cancel out what would be a build-up of vibratory frequencies.

In one case this averts the calamitous structural damage and possible destruction of buildings. In the case of the cello, this averts a build-up and recirculation of vibratory patterns that interfere, create aural beating, and impede playability. It’s the same phenomenon but at different scales.

I think I was searching for self-generative states where I could set up a resonance flow within the clarinet kind of like a Tudor-adjacent feedback system. I could then create this wild acoustical energy. I was trying to set up vibratory systems and conditions where the simplest thing possible would lead to the wildest, most ecstatic volatility and variety.

The first ones I developed were “ecstatic consciousness i” and “ecstatic consciousness ii.” Those are two perspectives of the same resonance.

WO: Okay, so those are actually the same base material extrapolated in different directions?

MG: Well, the first one was a fuck-up take in the studio, but I still thought it was an interesting take because there’s a sense of movement [presses fist into hand], like trying to break through a brick wall very slowly.

But in a basic technical way, there are ways of venting the clarinet where you can hear in greater or lesser clarity the harmonic content of the timbre. I was trying to detune specific timbral states with either my embouchure or by venting the instrument in different ways.

So, tuning my embouchure, tuning the system of the instrument, and tuning the interaction between all those to find these nodes of sonic-haptic agency. Tuning, detuning – it’s kind of the same thing when you look at it from different perspectives.

WO: Yeah, yeah, it’s orientation.

MG: Yeah, exactly. A lot of the wild aspects came about unexpectedly by just sitting with the resonances for so long…like sometimes months of messing around in this explorative way. Like, with “ecstatic consciousness i” it was a total accident when the ‘overdriven’ aspect of it started to come through, it was a surprise. I just noticed it was happening and then worked on being able to make it reproducible.

I was working on it more and one day it started to do the really jittery thing, to self-oscillate. And I was predisposed to think of it as generative music. It felt like music that was creating something beyond what I intended, in a way that I could then ‘dialogue’ with. But in dialoguing it’s a sort of negotiation, from moment to moment, of the circularity of hearing, responding, changing, putting air back through the instrument, over and over.

So, it also kind of gets into this paradigm of listening and the re-sounding of the senses that I was doing a lot of writing in, where resonance is creative of subjecthood, Jean-Luc Nancy, and this whole phenomenological business. Here’s an excerpt from Nancy’s essay on listening (Á l’écoute, 2002)

Consequently, listening is passing over to the register of presence to self, it being understood that the ‘self’ is precisely nothing available (substantial or subsistent) to which one can be “present,” but precisely the resonance of a return.”

One of the main rhetorical aspects at play in Nancy’s essay is the exploration of the dual meanings of the French ‘entendre,’ a verb that means both ‘to listen’ and ‘to understand.’

He teases out a web of linguistic and connotative associations between ‘resonance,’ ‘reverberation,’ ‘resounding,’ where you’ll notice that ‘re-’ implies a folding back and returning upon the subject – not just the ‘subject’ as the thing emitting the resounding, but the ‘subject’ as actually being created at the moment or return, or re- in resonance.

It raises questions about how much a space or an object (something not usually considered ‘alive’) is actually sensing in its own way and ‘responding’ to how it’s being heard, and responding to its playing.

WO: It sounds like it’s this process in which you start to notice these features of a particular sound and something about it starts to feel interesting or like it has potential. You could use the metaphor of sculpting this thing down and figuring out how the material itself can move within this world.

It’s also like surveying and the process of cartography where you’re essentially getting to know a space and exploring different zones to see what all the details are. It’s almost a subtractive process of finding a general territory that then over time gets successively honed in.

At least from how I hear it, the composition is the material, is the performance, is the object, is the listening experience. It’s this kind of thing that’s folded over.  Even though the sound is incredibly complex it’s as reduced as possible, like it is lean.

So there’s this tension between stasis and activity, but also between reduction and complexity and these things cohabitating at the same time. It’s interesting that you feel drawn to this state of simple input, complex output given your background as a highly committed contemporary music performer. 

MG: I think we’ve both experienced learning and performing a ton of music that complexly micromanages the body and can sometimes defamiliarize our senses of embodiment.

No matter how hard you try and how much work you do, these layers of interference actually sonically cancel themselves out; maybe not all the complexity that undergirds the performance is actually audible.

There’s part of my mind that loves that kind of strange detective work– of decoding a complex score and reassembling what we might take for granted as knowledge of the body in relation to our instruments. Finding patterns, solving puzzles, and just figuring out the inner mechanisms of things.

But the resonances scratch the itch of being really fascinated by something that’s very simple, from which something much larger can be extrapolated. This has been a mental habit of mine for as long as I can remember – being fascinated by things that were really small and seemingly mundane.

I would think if I could go deep enough into what they mean, or what their material qualities are, or how they are in the world, I could bottom out into the cosmic or some larger structure, you know?

WO: Yeah, totally.

MG: It’s like what we were joking about yesterday – this fascination with graffiti and being like, ‘Oh, the whole world is a text to be read.’ Kind of in the Jewish Kabbalistic tradition; the world is a text and you can find written letters and words in every form. Those can be literally read and recombined to find a hidden meaning. If there’s this thing that might appear to be simple, you can unlock it and crack it open, and it actually reveals something else. There’s a conceit to it that can be unfolded.

This graffiti fascination is a crossroads between that and this ethos from Baudelaire of finding correspondences between lived and worldly matter, but on a symbolic-lyrical plane. So, this aspect of finding correlations between locations, time periods, graffiti authors, what people are writing, and what’s going on in the zeitgeist asks questions about possible hidden threads between all these things and how they elucidate a broader texture of the times, and the experience of being alive right now.

WO: There’s even a kind of symbology behind it. Or there’s another side to it, a visible or audible identity, and then there are other sides that are not always ready at hand.

MG: Exactly. It’s a hermeneutic reading that comes from hermetic practices. Like hermeneutics and modern literary theory being derived from this conceit that a text or object has something hidden that bespeaks a larger structure or some mystery that can be teased out.

Total nerd zone over here but I think one way I got into feedback and self-generative shit was in a very very roundabout way through literary theory. Also by way of – don’t laugh at me – Walter Benjamin and reading the world and objects as self-actuating because of their objectness and their historical place within the world.

To me that is related in a way to a self-generative, self-propelling sonic practice where the thing takes on a kind of sentience, a meaning, on its own accord, whether I’m there or not. Everyone’s gaze and presence inflects the thing, but the thing also has its own material agency.

WO: Right. If you extrapolate metaphor from this, it’s not just what’s hidden within this one multiphonic or what’s hidden within this one fingering or this one key. But it’s what’s hidden within my instrument and what’s hidden within the instrument as a signifier and what’s hidden with the sound. It’s this kind of broadening.

MG: When one thinks of the sound, you always have to think about the body behind it. You also know this as a wind player, but one of the most mysterious things about wind pedagogy is figuring out this concept of embouchure. You have to really actively think about the inside of your face.

WO: A thing that you will never be able to see.

MG: Exactly. It’s the thing that’s most part of you, but simultaneously the most hidden, literally the inside of your mouth. I love that kind of tension paradox situation, where there’s always this search towards unveiling the hiddenness. Revealing it actually. It’s like, it’ll never be revealed!!

WO: Well, but that’s the unique situation of the wind instrument. The point of articulation, where the vibration starts, is hidden from you and it’s hidden from the listener. On the contrary, you can watch a string player and if they’re doing something that sounds similar, you might not as a listener understand exactly how what they’re doing is affecting the sound, but you can see if somebody leans in more with their bow, and something in the sound changes. But with some of these that you’re doing, especially if you’re not moving, there’s no visual signifier as to what’s going on. 

MG: Right. With these resonances, it’s oftentimes one state or one fingering. From the outside it looks very still, but the sound is highly mobile.

WO: Right. Again, there are these contradictions and these sites of ontological tension. If you think about the sound visually, it’s like technicolor. It’s so volatile and agile. But watching you perform this, you’re just still as a statue. I’ve always thought there’s a magic to that.

It’s not necessarily ‘extended techniques’ as a way of showing one’s prowess on the instrument, but it’s an identity thing. You see something and you expect a certain result, or you at least have an expectation thinking something should sound a certain way. But then you’re fully confronted with something else, and there’s a dissonance there between what is seen and what is heard.

At least for me as a listener, and I think for people that are generally interested in weird music shit, that’s one of these points in which it draws you in and you kind of either start to identify with a performer, or you start to just trance out or whatever. But it’s these states in which the listener can’t quite compute what’s happening.

MG: Right, and there’s a complex coupling that’s also at play between the air ‘inside’ the instrument and the air ‘outside’ the instrument– because they’re actually the same! So inflecting how air escapes the instrument, by making small adjustments to where the bell is in relation to my knee, or by shadowing the air above a given tonehole, then has real sonic consequences.

These things are at play in pieces like ‘smell of the moon’ and the ‘aspects beyond thought’ series. It’s a highly sensitive system that’s highly porous in a very literal sense.

WO: Right, the instrument is open all the time.

MG: Exactly, and that coupling comes about through literal porousness because the clarinet has a ton of holes. It’s fascinating to me: the bell is flared to decrease the severity of the impedance differential between the air inside and the air outside of the instrument, how the air within and the air without is coupled.

When I’m playing the air above the instrument, so hovering over a tonehole with my ring finger or something, I’m searching out the threshold where it starts intermodulating. The air escapes and refracts back in and creates these complex vibratory states, but if you disrupt the refraction, and mess with the air as it has already left and re-enters the instrument, the refractory patterns create phenomena that aren’t normatively heard but are still completely there and possible. 

WO: Despite all the subtle threshold stuff going on, the way you’re playing it – this shit’s loud.

MG: It’s really loud!

WO: The resonating instrument is the sound itself, but then the sound is also the space itself, especially in smaller spaces. It’s like the sound covers everything. So, if you’re venting the instrument, it’s this microscopic thing where if you’re changing the acoustics of the open tube, you’re also changing the acoustics of the room. It’s an amplifier of movements just as it’s an amplifier of sound.

MG: For sure. When I perform the resonances, the most common type of comment I hear from people is that it seems like the sound is coming from everywhere. People experience hearing particular frequencies in one part of the room, thinking that they’re coming from another.

So, the sense of directionality and the placement of one’s own body in relation to what one thinks is a fixed point is thrown up in the air. I think why people latch onto that is because it can be very disorienting.

It’s like, “Oh, I thought I was here…” One’s senses are usually helping triangulate and echolocate, but there’s this very complex experience that destabilizes the centricity of one’s own perception in a way.

WO: Right, which then points to another kind of fundamental contradiction. Again, you’re having this aural experience of something chaotic and multi-dimensional, and it’s happening all around you, but there are no speakers or visual references. You see the thing happening and you’re trying to make sense of how that’s happening up there, yet you’re hearing it from back behind you.

So, not only is the sound getting into an ecstatic, full-body, incredibly intense experience, but it’s also the ecstasy of not knowing how it’s happening. Like, I can see what is happening clearly enough, and yet the result is mysterious. There’s an ecstatic position in not knowing, and you have to surrender to experiencing this for what it is, rather than trying to deduce exactly what the situation is.

It sounds like the whole point is that even you don’t know. It’s not like you have a fixed piece of music that you either memorize or put on the stand or create, and then tell a story with it. It’s like, no, we’re going to get in the space and fuck shit up: “Fuck it, we ball.”

MG: Like… [sighs] A question I’ve been thinking about a lot in relation to this music and the performance of it is: How do we know we’re alive? You know? How do we know? There are certain things that we can do where we think we know. I obviously don’t have an answer to it, but there’s something about the extreme contingency and moment-to-moment reaffirmation of ‘Oh, this is what I’m experiencing.’

It’s kind of weird and all over and makes me have to re-question a lot of what I would take for granted in a listening situation. Or even a basic perceptual phenomenological situation, but somehow that process of reflecting upon the senses, the process of apperception, accrues a consciousness. One way of knowing we are alive is that that process is actually happening.

WO: Echolocation, literally, ‘Are my surroundings out there?’ They respond, ‘Yes, we’re out here’ and that affirms, ‘Okay, I guess I’m also here.’

MG: Whether it’s through sight or hearing or touch or taste or whatever of the sensorium is available to you, it takes on a call-and-response structure. ‘Sensing is a subject, or it does not sense’ (Jean-Luc Nancy, À l’Écoute, 8).

WO: Given that on the record each of these pieces are discreet tracks, how does a live performance differ?

MG: Oh, I wanted to talk about this.

WO: Well, let me introduce it first. 

MG: “Scooby Dooby Doo, wo bist du? Wir haben jetzt ‘was zu tun jetzt.” So the actual concert performance of this music varies quite a bit from the presentation of the album. With the album, I was able to focus on each resonance as a discrete study.

As for the performance, it’s a bit more wild style. The album is very stoic, reduced, and monolithic. In performance, it’s a lot more florid. And that’s in part because these resonances are exhausting to play, and it’s not always comfortable in a very physical pain-threshold sense.

WO: I mean, it’s the same for the listener, too. These are states where one cannot actually sustain ecstasy.

MG: It breaks at some point.

WO: It has to.

MG: So, there’s a lot more movement as a way of very basically relieving the embouchure, keeping a loose body. I’ve also been working more recently on a way of playing that actually involves more hand movements.

Like what we were talking about with the performance of new music, there’s such an emphasis on technical facility and agility in a very manual sense. You’re literally doing manual work with your hands, like operating machinery.

Part of the resonances at first was a corrective against that. I wanted to do the simple input complex output structure of a feedback system: something complex, focused, and honed in, but doesn’t rely on ‘technics’ in a commodified sense. 

WO: But there’s still technique in a certain sense, there’s subtlety and nuance in all of these.

MG: It’s ‘The Question Concerning Technology’: ‘Are we in a poiesis right now?’ Sorry, but like, is this poiesis? [laughs]

WO: If you think of these instruments as a construction of your diaphragm, your lungs, the pressure in your chest, how your shoulders are shaped, all that down to which keys are pressed on the instrument, where the bell is pointing, etc., you’re getting at what’s behind the technics.

Usually technique means something like, “Are you doing your air right?” “Are you moving your fingers fast enough?” “Are you making the system vibrate correctly?” Whereas this is actually about what’s one level beneath that the things that make it possible for the system to resonate. Then that’s the material; that’s the kind of compositional mucking around.

MG: It’s taking what is sort of subliminally peripherally there and making it central.

WO: It’s not just about taking the material apart. It’s about taking the physical properties of how you make the sound, and then reintroducing all this other stuff and re-coupling things together.

MG: Yeah, I’m trying to think of some of the more florid stuff that I’m doing as having a fixed identity on a formal level, embedded within flexibility on a granular level. There’s a simultaneous openness and closedness about the identity of it. Or a logic that I draw out freely. 

But there’s something else that I’ve been trying to approach. All these forms, as well as the extremely static-slash-volatile  resonances, they’re all in motion on a larger scale across time and iteration. If I played the same set each time, to me it wouldn’t feel true to the ethos of the performance practice or to the music. Especially since the music itself is highly mobile and needs to be created anew each time.

There’s this sort of repository of states of actions that I need to find my way into, and then sit with and try to enliven. Sometimes it doesn’t happen, and the movement and floridness are a way of reconciling that all the conditions at play – the reed, the instrument, the weather, my self – aren’t aligned in the ways they need to be for that ecstatic nature to happen. So, I have to either sit with it, accept what does happen and try to work with it, or I need to just move on.

WO: Right, which then goes back to being attracted to these intermediate states and very real contingency.

MG: My predisposition is even if something is stable, to push it a little too far so that it ends up destabilizing. Or with the resonances, there always comes a time in performance, and you’ll hear this tonight, where I do fuck up. It’s not making a mistake per se, it’s just that I have this thing where I can’t not push it until it breaks.

It’s maybe a way of boundary-testing within an already unstable system. Whether it’s squeaking or not hitting the right partial, or a faulty start or getting spit in my reed, or my embouchure feeling like it’s about to fly off the mouthpiece because it feels so weird and tired.

WO: So, going back to the solo practice, you have this first presentation, a sort of studio version, or maybe even dare I say, the museum piece. It reminds me of a lot of the sculptors John Chamberlain or Charles Ray, who were engaged in a very fundamentally iterative practice.

I kind of see the record as this type of installation, where you have these sculptures that are all made of the same material but inhabit different forms. They’re arrayed in a room and you’re observing all of them, and moving around them. So you have the install version, you have the live performance…what’s next?

MG: I definitely feel like the solo practice is still wild and unruly. The act of playing always becomes a mirror of one’s own mind. I definitely have an idea for a second album and want to follow this more florid style, a style I associate with the ethos of the troubadours. I feel there is something about the nature of singing that I’m trying to get at. 

WO: I’ve heard you use ‘lyricism’ multiple times before.

MG: There’s definitely a lyricism I’m trying to work out and embody. And lyricism doesn’t necessarily equate to narrative, or melody. There’s something else…

WO: But this is the kind of lyricism that I think you’re getting at that I also find is interesting. It’s actually a lyricism that’s somehow in the sound itself. There’s an article I think from ‘96 by Jürg Frey, engaging in this post-Cagean lineage wherein the removal of one’s direct action in shaping the sound allows the sound itself to speak.

Even just by sustaining something and not actively pushing it somewhere, by just letting it resonate, there’s an inner life to the sound. You can listen into the interior of something and follow the thread of an inherent lyricism within. It’s presenting the sound’s melody, not your melody. A lot of things that I see are starting to get more interested in a kind of interior melodicism to something. 

MG: That reminded me of the phrase, ‘There’s something in the air.’ It quite literally is something in the air that you’re listening for. What I want to do with the lyrical and florid nature, as well as the static nature, is create a condition for that interiority to fly forth, and become something tangibly present. 

I’m setting the conditions for something else to come forth – that lyricism of dialoguing with something that’s in the air and circularly influencing my own musical decisions. I think this notion of interiority is fascinating as a position, because a listener is already interior. They’re already in the sound because the sound is actually the room. It is actually the space.

WO: The sound is literally something that’s in the air. Or something is the movement of the air. It’s not even in the air…

MG: Yeah, it is the air. I find that so, so beautiful. There’s something weirdly spiritual about it, because it’s what gives us all life – the air we breathe. It goes through the instrument, it’s shaped in its passage by our interactions with the instrument, by the room, and then perforates and reverberates throughout amidst getting in your ears. It gets to this whole phenomenology thing that conceives of sound as touching, you know? 

WO: Like spooky action at a distance. A movement happens over here and it’s transmitted through the air until the index or ghost of it literally touches the other person.

MG: Yeah, so listening to the interior, or trying to listen into the interior of the sound, it’s less about sound and more about your mind.

Madison Greenstone is a New York-based clarinetist, and member of TAK Ensemble. They perform across a wide range of experimental and contemporary music contexts as a soloist, improviser, and chamber musician. Some memorable performances have been at the New York Philharmonic with TAK, playing exstatic resonances at KM28, as part of the Merce Cunningham Centennial in LA, and solo in the Vigeland Mausoleum in Oslo. Their solo album “Resonance Studies in Ecstatic Consciousness” can be heard on Relative Pitch Records, and was recognized in Bandcamp’s Best Experimental Music of 2023 selection.

Weston Olencki (b. 1992; Spartanburg, S.C.) is a musician, composer, and sound artist based in Berlin, Germany. Their current work is centered around questions of instrumental music and its contexts and constructs, various mediated practices of listening and improvisation, and the technological, material, and cultural histories of rural space and time.