Language At An Angle Record Release Show: Sam Wenc + Friends, Victor Viera/Sam Yulsman Duo
Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Atonement
1542 East Montgomery Ave.
Philadelphia
Feb. 5, 2026
Some of the most adventurous young musicians in Philadelphia’s ever-burgeoning creative music scene gathered last night – both on the stage and in the audience – to celebrate the release of a new album of material from Sam Wenc, the multi-hyphenate musician and artist who previously recorded and performed under the moniker Post Moves. He’s releasing music under his own name for the first time with his latest, ambitious LP titled Language At An Angle, and under his own label, Lobby Art Editions. Leading the ensemble on pedal steel and mallet percussion, he was joined by an expansive coterie of venerable improvisers and composers in their own right: Sam Yulsman (piano), Joey Sullivan (drums), John Moran (double bass), Victor Vieira Branco (vibraphone, sometimes bowed), Will Henriksen (violin), Matthew Lee (bass clarinet, saxophone), and Jack Braunstein (clarinet).
The program began with a duo performance from Branco and Yulsman on their respective instruments. Their performance was an unsegmented, 45-minute onslaught of punk virtuosity, fiercely digging into the percussive properties of their instruments; the first movement, consisting mostly of an unrelenting, lockstep rhythmic gesture that required immense stamina to maintain – a sort of musical glossolalia – made me think of a celesta gradually losing its mind, tearing itself apart in a violent fit of atonality. (Have you ever seen Being John Malkovich? Imagine Malkovich replaced with Steve Reich and John Cusack replaced with Cecil Taylor and you’ll have the right idea. Or maybe not.) The sheer energy both musicians burned throughout could be overwhelming – at least one mallet was broken, and Branco is no ordinary vibist: he strikes hard when he wants to – but I admired the audacious choices, the almost-painful adherence to rhythms and patterns for long stretches, and the occasional bursts of dark tonality.
We’ve covered Wenc before in this space, and on his own, his free-improv chops are just as furious. What was remarkable about the performance of this ensemble – especially after the duo set, which seemed to my ears almost entirely harmonically unstable – was Wenc’s naked pursuit of beauty and catharsis in the nexus between improvisation and composition. The group’s music was reminiscent (and I mean this as the highest compliment) of the scrappy, liberated instrumental grandeur of groups like Dirty Three and Godspeed!, but with Wenc as the beating heart at the center of it all, your attention was drawn to the left field applications of his instrument: though his pedal steel playing is fiercely evocative, and can at times possess the same high-lonesome quality of his more traditional forebears, he’s never cloying or formulaic. He employs techniques like rapidly shaking a small bronze-alloy cymbal across the strings, exploiting the complex chord combinations of the open tunings; striking strings with a soft mallet, like an exposed piano; and scraping a rosin’d bow or a far-less-smooth metal bar around, all producing sounds that are unexpected and otherworldly. There’s a near-total absence of cliché and stock pedal steel licks or technique at work; he barely even uses the pitch-bending pedals, often preferring to slide the bar around, burrowing into the more-often-neglected micro-tonal bending corners of the instrument’s purview. There were stunning, stark moments where his instrumental voice shined, and there were stretches of intense volcanic power, when the whole crew swelled with dynamic pressure, brilliantly firing an immense sound in all directions. With any luck, Wenc will have the privilege of leading ensembles of this size and scope for many years to come; like his pedal steel, it’s a tool he wields expertly and with a creative vision all his own.
