our own music

Since 2006, the members of So Percussion have been writing music for the ensemble.  Using our studio in Brooklyn as a laboratory, we often create music that is about "place:" a city, our immediate sonic environment, even how the past resonates where we are today.  

 

In the process, we have sometimes stretched the percussion ensemble to its limits.  Following Cage's example, and inspired by collaborators like Matmos, we have integrated electronics, ambient noise, and whatever else interests us.   You can enjoy many features and excerpts of this music on our Youtube channel.

 

our own music by So Percussion 

 

where (we) live

(where (we) live is currently a work-in-progress, slated to premiere in fall of 2012.  Below is our description-in-progress.)

We live not only in physical places, but also in symbolic ones. 

Rooms, buildings, and ideas enclose and define those spaces, often in very personal ways.   

Jane Jacobs inspires us to think about diverse, mixed elements where we live.  

In our many collaborations with other artists, we have sometimes been surprised at what they have to teach us.

For where (we) live, Sō Percussion is using artists from different mediums as outside inputs to our creative process.  We will ask them to improvise, dance, make video, or whatever else they can think of, and we will both fit them into our artistic world and adjust to fit into theirs. 

We are choosing a small group of key collaborators to each inhabit his or her own space, to show us what's inside. 

Our responses to this input vary from the loosest improvisations to the most rigidly structured compositions -- from narrative play-along to abstract co-existence.

Imaginary City

Imaginary City is a meditation on urban life and its sounds, architecture, light and color. It is a dialogue between So Percussion and video artist Jenise Treuting, a poetic exchange. Musical, visual, and theatrical elements combine into impressions of city life. Featuring original music by the members of So, with Pulitzer-nominated Director and Playwright Rinde Eckert. 

In 2009, Imaginary City ran for 4 nights at the BAM Next Wave Festival, and has toured across the country.  

Imaginary City is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by BAM for the 2009 Next Wave Festival in consortium with The Myrna Loy Center/Helena Presents in partnership with Diverseworks Art Space, The Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Newman Center for the Performing Arts and NPN.

Music for Trains

In the summer of 2008, So Percussion was in residence in Southern Vermont with Vermont Performance Lab.  Our task was to write new site-specific music for the train stations in Brattleboro and Bellows Falls.  We ended up creating an evening-length experience:  audience members listened to pre-loaded music players aboard a historic train ride between the two towns, getting off in each town to take in a live performance.  

Music for Trains represented So's first venture into collaborative writing between the members.  

Amid the Noise

Our third Cantaloupe Music CD Amid the Noise began as an after-hours project. In our Brooklyn studio, Jason Treuting experimented with glockenspiel, toy piano, vibraphones, bowed marimba, melodica, tuned and prepared pipes, metals, a wayward ethernet port, and sound programming. The resulting idiosyncratic tone explorations were synchronized to Jenise Treuting’s haunting films of street scenes in Brooklyn and Kyoto.