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.
Songs on Acknowledgement often drift between the political and the personal. On “Wave Games” an anxious piano line provides the backbone for Trecka’s reflection on visiting the ocean with his child and, while watching him play in the waves, reflecting on the multivalence of bodies of water – as connectors, dividers of land masses and the struggles of those who cross them in search of better material conditions. Ships literally passing in the night as supertankers valet the refined natural goods of several countries reduced to a supply chain. “A Sea of Tents” reflects on statelessness and unreasonable responses to unreasonable situations over an impressionistic piano composition punctuated by brash bass notes and distressed tape loops that signal like a lighthouse fading from sight. The only instrumental track on the album, the album’s title track opens up caverns between piano notes that are wide enough to cast our worried thoughts into and never hear them hit the bottom. There is a lift, however, towards a cacophonous conclusion that finds joy in making very, very loud sounds over and over. Signal. Repeat. Forever.
Released by Whited Sepulchre Records.