Music review: Architek Percussion finds tactile new sounds through drumming, in world premiere
Visually striking and sonically adventurous concert rolls out Sabrina Schroeder’s epic Stircrazer I
Architek Percussion pushes the bounds of the drum kit.
Setting up in the four corners of Heritage Hall.
Music on Main presented Architek Percussion at Heritage Hall on March 29.
IF YOU’VE been through an earthquake here on the West Coast, you know it’s a weird experience that you both hear and feel in your body—and it’s hard to separate the two sensations.
That’s a lot like witnessing the opening of Sabrina Schroeder’s epic new Stircrazer I, which had its world premiere in an immersive and striking performance at Heritage Hall on March 29. The drum mavericks of Montreal’s Architek Percussion sat at their kits in four corners of the room, feet rattling their bass-drum pedals—and sending out a rumbling that vibrated through the space.
The Music on Main composer-in-residence’s piece saw a surround-sound performance installation—complete with Kyla Gardiner’s lighting design of standing, fluorescent-glowing rods across the floor—that was a visually cool and fully sensory experience.
Schroeder employs transducers in her compositions, allowing the musicians to transmit low-frequency acoustic vibrations that can be felt by audience members. But she also creates a variety of tools to manipulate the subtle and resonant sounds that the percussionists make. That may mean the swishing of steel wool against a hand drum, or the unearthly groaning of a bow drawn over a string that’s been rigged across the bass drum.
The 43-minute piece is a sonic adventure—best enjoyed when you lose yourself in it, associating each echoing thump or ripple with your own mental imagery. True to the group’s name, Stircrazer I uses sound to shape a space.
It’s just as thrilling to watch the synergy between the musicians—Noam Bierstone, Ben Duinker, Alexander Haupt, and Ben Reimer. In a system of elaborate cues, they signalled each other from across the room—a reminder of the exactitude of music that feels as random and unstabilizing (probably by design) as an about-to-erupt volcano or the distant thunder of an arriving storm. An enjoyable trip into the unknown.
The program opened with Julia Wolfe’s shorter Dark Full Ride, a perfect contrast that was a bit more about the exploration of temporal stability, and the mindblowing technical realms of rhythm and metre. Like so much of Architek’s work, it showed the vast range of artistic possibilities for the drum kit—in a fun, visceral way.
For this piece, the members of the crew were centred in the middle of the space, facing each other at their drums. The first half concentrated almost exclusively on the “top” of the kits, exploring the sonic possibilities of the hi-hat cymbals. That ranged from staccato rain on a tin roof to something more mysterious, metallic, and machinelike. Wolfe then switched to the lower, bass realms of the instrument, before building to a frenzied, adrenalized crescendo that was—to use a very non-experimental-music term—off the hook.
Good news for those who missed the soldout show: it was being filmed by Collide Entertainment and will be available at some point soon for viewing. Whether you’ll experience its rumbling lows and metallic highs in quite the same sensory way remains to be seen—or, at least, felt.
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