The works on this album embody both the repertoire and spirit of avant-garde “tradition” of percussion music my own percussive personality. I say “tradition” because if percussion has a common practice, it is more a practice than a set of repertoire: a mindset of envelope-pushing taking stage within a theater (both literal and imagined) of instruments, techniques, and aesthetics modalities.

While Tonia Ko’s *Blue Skin of the Sea* and Iannis Xenakis’ Psappha vary widely in aesthetic, they both embody a revolutionary organicism. Each actively subverts norms of narrative, instrumental idioms and sound world, positing a radical new identity for their “instrument” (or collection of instruments). Lastly, they unfurl musical ideas that could only be realized on percussion instruments, blending surprising techniques organically and reconfiguring notions of idiomatic performance practice.

Tonia Ko’s  Blue Skin of the Sea (commissioned in 2014 by a consortium of percussionists)  takes  a closer look at the “skin” of the marimba by exploring the “intimate, horizontal world of marimba bars” and the way the instrument’s sound seems to float several feet above the instrument. Tonia uses the distinctive way the marimba’s sound is created to steer the work’s large-scale structure, creating a gradual timbral transformation from soft/resonant to dry/brittle and back again. The 1st and last movements emerge from the fifth partial above the marimba’s lowest C with a squirmy grace, while the fourth is a combination of the the Hawaiian lullaby “Pupu Hinuhinu” (“Shiny Shells”), ragtime xylophone, and a tuning ditty used by “a classroom full of fourth graders strumming tiny toy ukuleles in not quite unison.” The third movement (“Curiouser”) is a rustle-y interlude, while the second movement—Blue Skin of the Sea’s musical center—is a flabbergastingly unique world of scrapes and dots.

A desire to depict complex acoustical phenomena led Xenakis, a composer and engineer whose work with Le Courbusier and Messiaen framed his musical personality, to apply stochastic techniques to his work. Texture is Xenakis’ primary variable, and in Psappha (1975) the texture is comprised of rhythmic structures lifted from the the Archiac Greek poet Sappho, which suffuse the work at the atomic and structural level. Xenakis leaves the choice of the work’s six groups of instruments to the performer, and these teams interact alternately coalesce and run in parallel. Psappha is an outlier in a world of drum sets and marimbas: a coalescence of ancient Greek scansion, layered counterpoint, and modernist brutality, alternately jagged and suave.  It’s a hardcover novel in a world of pulp fictions.

The beautiful cover art from Jasmine Parsia is a nod to Ko’s depictions of water’s surface as well as the Xenakis’ visual and sonic textures.

-Michael Compitello