Implication by Mark Trecka

Implication is Mark Trecka’s third full-length solo recording. It is his first entirely instrumental full-length release.

With only one exception, all sounds on Implication were sourced from a single prepared piano improvisation which Trecka recorded during the same session that resulted in his recent LP Acknowledgment. He then took these relatively few sounds and manipulated them into cassette loops before further shaping them into the four narrative compositions that make up Implication.

Given the limit and uniformity of the source material, the breadth of sonic textures, tones, and moods that comprise the record is remarkable. Lyrical passages interweave with percussive hammering and harmonic drones, brief moments extended and bent by distressed magnetic tape.

And the one exception to the uniformity of the source material is significant. Just over the record’s halfway mark, “Radiance” emerges –– an expansive and shimmering collaboration between Trecka and longtime friend Walt McClements, whose processed accordion both pushes and pulls Trecka’s pulsing loops. While McClements’ work has been compared to that of Kali Malone and Tim Hecker, in this context one might also think of a rough around the edges outtake from Another Green World. Rough indeed, for while Brian Eno looms large over generations of ambient work, Trecka’s approach is steeped in a sort of naiveté and raw experimentalism that lends his work as much a sense of within-arms-reach intimacy and tactility as celestial expansiveness.

Trecka’s work continues to revolve around intertextual approaches as well. While Implication stands on its own as a self-contained listening experience, the record’s title track was initially created for an intermedial broadcast performance on Radio alHara, a streaming radio station based in Bethlehem, Ramallah and Amman. Trecka collected writings by people incarcerated in New York State, where he currently lives, and then used Radio alHara’s chat to broadcast these curated texts, timed strategically with the airing of “Implication.”

And while that piece extends to over 18 minutes and while its dramatic, episodic minimalism reaches beyond its own sounds to connect with, by implication, the lives of those who are so often forgotten, the closing track, “Focus as Shelter” is a relative pop song, calling to mind Aphex Twin’s Drukqs or the work of Kelly Moran. At three-and-a-half minutes long, “Focus as Shelter” is made only of the dulcet tones of semi-muted piano strings, spiraling into a hummable major key tune, which closes the record on a warm note, inviting the listener to go on or perhaps return to the beginning.

Mark Trecka is a Chicago-born writer, sound artist, performer, and activist. His work utilizes intermedial techniques, engaging various juxtapositions of text and sound to explore both explicit and implied meaning.