L.A. Percussion Quartet Reaches BEYOND in NY Debut, 6/1

The third album from the critically-acclaimed, Grammy-nominated Los Angeles Percussion Quartet, comes out Friday, June 16 on the Sono Luminus label. The high-fidelity release includes two CDs and one Blu-ray surround-sound audio disc, 86 minutes of music in all. As the title suggests, Beyond finds the LAPQ in an expansive mode, building a community of international composers with ties to the ensemble's home base.

The release will be marked by a bicoastal pair of multimedia shows: Thursday, June 1 (7 pm) at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, and Friday, June 16 (7:30 pm) at the Joyce J. Cammilleri Hall on USC's University Park Campus in Los Angeles. Tickets for the Brooklyn show can be purchased at nationalsawdust.org; tickets for the USC show will be available at the door.

Beyond features first recordings of commissioned works from Icelandic composers Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Daniel Bjarnason, both featured in the Los Angeles Philharmonic's recent Reykjavík Festival; rising LA-based composers Andrew McIntosh and Ellen Reid; and Pulitzer Prize finalist Christopher Cerrone, a New Yorker whose frequent LA performances include his opera Invisible Cities, premiered by The Industry at Union Station in 2013.

The recording is stunningly lifelike: producer Dan Merceruio and engineer Dan Shores have expertly captured LAPQ's precision, interpretive empathy, and command of instrumental color. Along with the two standard CDs, the package includes a Pure Audio Blu-ray disc with 9.1 Auro-3D and 5.1 Surround Sound versions, as well as the mShuttle application containing FLAC, WAV, and MP3 audio files.

Yet Beyond defies the popular stereotype of Hi-Fi percussive bombast. Rather, it provides a spacious canvas for sounds at the edge of perception, from the latent volcanic rumbles of Bjarnason's Qui Tollis to the hushed chimes of McIntosh's 40-minute opus I Hold the Lion's Paw. No less than LAPQ's celebrated artistry, Beyond embodies the aesthetic maturity of the percussion quartet medium itself.

Observes conductor/composer Christopher Rountree in the album's liner notes, "The music of Los Angeles, and larger of the West Coast, has always been about space, place, awareness, and the sound of deep listening... The compositional languages of Thorvaldsdottir, Cerrone, Reid, Bjarnason, and McIntosh appear as interwoven and complex as Los Angeles itself. Their music similarly courses with chiming repetition, spectral near-silence, and the wearing away of time on objects so barely touched that they appear, in moments, as fragile as paper.

"The album...shows LAPQ at its finest: endlessly versatile, sonically considerate, curatorially wise, and brilliantly electrifying performers. Beyond brings the world to LA, and LAPQ out into the world."

Disc I of Beyond opens with Qui Tollis (2013) by Icelandic composer Daniel Bjarnason, who has been commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Britten Sinfonia, Jennifer Koh, So Percussion, and the Calder Quartet, among many others. He records for the Bedroom Community label, and has collaborated with artists from beyond the classical world, such as Sigur Rós & Efterklang. The title comes from the Agnus Dei text of the Ordinary of the Mass, "Qui tollis peccata mundi," i.e. "who takes away the sins of the world."

Anna Thorvaldsdottir's Aura follows. Described by NPR music as "a fascinating young composer on the rise," Thorsvaldsdottir "excels at weaving sound textures together to create distinct atmospheres." In her program note, she describes the work's imaginative design: "Three percussionists present three sides of the same being and carry each other's materials throughout the work like a single voice in a stream of sustained sounds and textures. The fourth percussionist plays a 'bell theme' that serves as the external material to the other textures in the work."

Christopher Cerrone is rapidly gaining notice with works for Eighth Blackbird, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the Calder Quartet, and other major ensembles. His Memory Palace features both traditional percussion instruments and found objects, including a restrung guitar lying on its back, slats of wood sawed to resonate at specific pitches, tuned metal pipes, and blown bottles filled with water. Each of the work's five movements represents a place significant to the composer. Specific recollections - rumble strips on the side of a highway, a grid of high-voltage wires, crickets in the woods - give rise to memorable musical images.

Ellen Reid's music encompasses opera, chamber music, electronic pop songs, theater and film scores, and immersive installations; it "brims with canny invention" (LA Weekly). Disc I concludes with her Fear | Release, which is dominated by chimes, bells, crotales, and other metallic instruments. She describes it as "an experiment in creating a piece that comes together instead of falling apart. The piece starts in a timid space and gradually becomes more and more bold... Phrases echo and connect between the players throughout the space. These moments of unified cacophony are made even more meaningful through the surround sound recording."

The entirety of Disc II is given over to Andrew McIntosh's I Hold the Lion's Paw. Writes The New Yorker, "McIntosh's spare, rarefied sonorities, which tilt away from traditional tunings, give an air of mythic otherness." Clocking in at some 40 minutes, I Hold the Lion's Paw is undoubtedly one of the most ambitious single-movement works ever written for the medium. Paraphrasing Morton Feldman, McIntosh notes that "the form of a piece of music over 20 minutes or so in length ceases to be concerned with structure and instead is about strategy." In this work, his strategy hinges on moments he calls "gifts to the listener:" surprising contrasts, spatial dislocations (the percussionists perform surrounding the audience), unexpected timbres. His aim is give rise to "an overall feeling that is perhaps a bit like singing joyful, yet solemn, praises - or at least like celebrating a sense of wonder at the world."

Since 2009, the GRAMMY-nominated Los Angeles Percussion Quartet (LAPQ) has established itself as a one of the leading ensembles of its kind, dedicated to commissioning, presenting, and recording new works for percussion quartet. Members Matt Cook, Justin DeHart, Cory Hills, and Nick Terry formed the group to embrace West Coast musical traditions of artistic independence and cultural inclusion. In doing so, LAPQ has forged meaningful connections with contemporary audiences while broadening its mission through educational initiatives.

LAPQ has earned widespread recognition for its dynamic and captivating recordings on Sono Luminus Records. The group's seminal album R?pa-Khandha, recorded in 2012 at Skywalker Ranch in Marin, CA, pioneered a new level of sonic achievement as the first 7.1 surround-sound high-fidelity recording of percussion chamber music. It won multiple nominations in the 55th GRAMMY Awards, including the coveted category of Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance. In 2014, LAPQ released its second surround-sound album on Sono Luminus, entitled The Year Before Yesterday. Spotlighting music by three generations of Los Angeles composers, the album was hailed by The New York Times as "mesmerizing," with "colorful, atmospheric and...supremely melodic music." June 2017 brings LAPQ's third surround-sound album, Beyond, recorded at Sono Luminus's studio in Boyce, Virginia. The two-disc set captures LAPQ's riveting performances of works by composers from Reykjavík, New York, and Los Angeles, all with ties to the ensemble's home base.

LAPQ performs widely throughout the West Coast, appearing on Monday Evening Concerts and the Piano Spheres series, guesting as concerto soloists, and collaborating with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Industry, Long Beach Opera, and other notable groups. In June 2017, LAPQ makes its East Cast debut at National Sawdust in Brooklyn.

The quartet is committed to sharing its deep knowledge of percussion music with young composers and performers through commissioning projects, master classes, workshops, and direct creative collaborations. Los Angeles Percussion Quartet's members are proud Yamaha Performing Artists and endorsers of Innovative Percussion, REMO, Black Swamp Percussion, and Sabian Cymbals. Website: www.lapq.org.

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