Chicago-born, New York-based writer, performer, and artist Mark Trecka recently released his debut full-length album Acknowledgment on Whited Sepulchre Records. Utilizing cassette tape loops, piano and Trecka’s voice, the record sits at the intersection between the intellectual and the intuitive, at times fragmentary and experimental and others emotional and minimalist.
Mark Trecka says Acknowledgment is a reflection on fifteen years of dialogue between the personal and the political, and is more akin to an intertextual artwork than a conventional album. Drawing on work from the likes of writer Yuri Herrara, Public Enemy and prison abolitionist and artist Jackie Wang, Trecka explores what he describes as the “fascia connecting us all, despite the designed invisibility of certain communities,” with particular reference to “stateless persons, incarcerated persons and houseless individuals.”
These connections come in many forms. Take ‘Wave Games’, with its restless piano and awkward, automated rhythms, which contemplates the role of rivers and oceans as both a nexus of links and as impassable barriers. This in turn reflects on juxtapositions between global supply chains of oil tankers and cargo ships and the plight of individuals forced to cross bodies of water in search of better living conditions. The record’s mid-point, ‘Guides’ also draws on themes of interconnection, a song Trecka says “pushes back against the chaotic cult of the self by seeking guides—those who have gained knowledge through experience—above the speculative brashness of ‘leaders’.”
The title track is the record’s only instrumental, a patient beginning of plaintive piano and aching negative space eventually giving way to a cacophony of sound and energy. It’s a moment of unabashed abandon that finds wild hope in the affirming physicality of noise. Or, as the press release puts it, the “joy in making very, very loud sounds over and over.” It’s a wordless reminder that although Mark Trecka is committed to exploring serious themes, his work is far from devoid of hope. Rather, Acknowledgement is a compassionate work of art which insists that we as a society share both our joys and our burdens.
Acknowledgement is out now and you can get it from Whited Sepulchre Records or the Mark Trecka Bandcamp page.
