For twenty years and counting, Sō Percussion has redefined chamber music for the 21st century through an “exhilarating blend of precision and anarchy, rigor and bedlam” (The New Yorker). They are celebrated by audiences and presenters for a dazzling range of work: for live performances in which “telepathic powers of communication” (The New York Times) bring to life the vibrant percussion repertoire; for an extravagant array of collaborations in classical music, pop, indie rock, contemporary dance, and theater; and for their work in education and community, creating opportunities and platforms for music and artists that explore the immense possibility of art in our time.
Since its first performance as a student ensemble in 1999, Sō Percussion has appeared at many of the most prestigious concert halls and festivals around the world, including Carnegie Hall, the Paris Philharmonie, the Barbican Centre, Walt Disney Hall with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel, the Lincoln Center Festival, at the international TED conference, and throughout Europe, Australia, and South America. In 2020, Sō conducted an Amid the Noise residency at the University of Trinidad and Tobago, and performed in the finals of Panorama with the Caribbean Airlines Skiffle Steel Orchestra. Sō has been featured on WNYC’s Radiolab with Jad Abumrad, NPR’s Weekend Edition, NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concert, New Sounds with John Schaefer, and elsewhere.
Their catalogue of more than twenty-five albums features landmark recordings of works by David Lang, Steve Reich, Steve Mackey, and many other composers. They have also commissioned and are advocates for works by contemporary composers such as David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Steven Mackey, and Caroline Shaw. Distinctively modern collaborations with artists who work outside the classical concert hall, include Shara Nova, choreographers Susan Marshall and John Heginbotham, The National, Buke & Gase, Bryce Dessner, and many others.
They recently released two outstanding albums with frequent collaborator Caroline Shaw. Narrow Sea, which won a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition, and Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, which features songs that Shaw and Sō developed over three days of studio time. Both albums were toured across the US and Europe, with dates at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, Our Festival in Finland, Thuringer Bachwochen in Germany, the Palau de la Musica in Barcelona, and a sold out performance at the Barbican’s Milton Court.
This season, they tour their Nonesuch Records album Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part with Caroline Shaw across Europe and the US. Sō Percussion is in its tenth year as Edward T. Cone performers-in-residence at Princeton University.
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Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part and other works with Caroline Shaw
Barbican Milton Court, December 2022
Sō Percussion gleefully trample across the boundaries of musical genres, and constantly provoke reassessments of what a percussion group can do. Together with Caroline Shaw they have been touring a set drawn from those two albums, Narrow Sea and Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part... Sometimes Sō Percussion add complex rhythmic and chordal layers to Shaw’s voice, sometimes she duets with a single instrumentalist; in the Abba setting, Lay All Your Love on Me, for instance, a solo marimba wraps itself around the vocal line, which slows down the original riff until it is virtually unrecognisable, becoming something utterly timeless. There seems a confessional tinge to many of Shaw’s songs, but something strikingly beautiful about many of them too. Earlier Sō had played three pieces composed for them, all slickly exploiting the group’s knack of seeking out new ways of expanding their percussive sound world. Angélica Negrón’s Gone (2020) and Go Back, composed this year, use robotic instruments to lay further rhythmic layers on to ambient backgrounds, the first doomy and forbidding, the second outward going and dance-like. Julia Wolfe’s Forbidden Love uses the instruments of a string quartet as her sound sources, but has the percussionists play them with thimbles, chopsticks and lengths of cord; string players might be horrified, but the sounds are fresh and always inventive.
Andrew Clements, The Guardian
Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part (UK premiere) with Caroline Shaw
Norfolk & Norwich Festival, May 2022
Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part pits [Shaw's] clear, radiant and impeccably tuned voice against four percussionists: the Brooklyn-based So Percussion, who play a lot more than conventional drums and marimbas. The album’s ten songs deploy flowerpots, steel pans and sirens, as well as electronics that sometimes turn Shaw’s voice into an echoing polyphony... Using reflective texts from the poet Anne Carson and the Bible as well as her own words, Shaw conjures a song cycle that is mostly poignant and often spiritually transcendental. Indeed, her vocal lines often seem to hark back to folksong and ancient church music, most strikingly in her sparse, heartbreaking deconstruction of Abba’s Lay All Your Love on Me...I was hooked.
Richard Morrison, The Times ****
Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part
Nonesuch Records (June 2021)
Pulitzer Prize-winner Caroline Shaw joins the New York percussion quartet for a suite of songs melding folk elements with modern composition...There’s no shortage of artists pulling together the worlds of folk influenced songs and modern composition, but the way lyrics and instruments work together to tease at the literal on Let The Soil Play Its Simple Part marks it out. Shaw and Sō Percussion’s songs seem like contraptions pushing at the boundaries of what can easily be conveyed through words and music. These ten tracks delving deep into the beauty of ambiguity and dancing on the periphery of the graspable
Daryl Worthington, The Quietus
This latest venture with So Percussion is every bit as vivid and colourful as the acclaimed Narrow Sea released earlier this year. While Let The Soil Play its Simple Part is in one sense a ‘solo album’ (Shaw’s radiant vocals are heard throughout), it is also an experiment in deep collaboration…The result is a glorious, genre-defying disc by turns poignant, celebratory, complex and direct. The disc draws on a deliciously eclectic range of sounds, including marimba, steel drum, looped vocals, electronics and (seemingly) cascades of small glass bottles…the disc deftly shifts between rhythmic punch and delicate introspection: To The Sky finds the voice enfolded in intricate polyrhythms, while Lay All Your Love On Me reimagines ABBA’s classic as a sparse, melancholic Bach chorale. Beautifully performed and expertly produced, this is music making at its most vital, expressive and imaginative
Kate Wakeling, BBC Music Magazine, performance *****, recording *****
Caroline Shaw is a genre-bending modern classicist who has also worked with Kanye West, Nas, The National and others. Sō Percussion are a New York quartet who embrace the widest possibilities of their style of instrumentation, usually with a vanguard classical slant. Together, they create an approachable music that owes a debt to serialist composition, topped with Shaw’s singing. It’s original and thought-provoking, if also sometimes challenging
The Arts Desk
To the Sky quietly awakens with gentle humming and a softly rumbling marimba. Gradually the song blooms, and near the end Caroline Shaw's voice bursts open in pure radiant sunshine...Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part is a joint effort with the band Sō Percussion and it showcases Shaw's flexible voice – clear as a mountain stream, flowing with expression in many directions.
Tom Huizenga, NPR Music
'A Record Of...' collaboration with Buke & Gase
With Buke & Gase / Brassland Records (Feb 2021)
On this new collaborative set with So Percussion, Buke and Gase’s rhythmically surprising, grungy work occasionally takes on a newly warm tinge…. Dreamy vibraphone, mellow kalimba and pinging glockenspiel offer enchanting support for Dyer’s siren-song refrains on the first track, Diazepam… The result is a fusion that’s fluid instead of forced.
New York Times - ‘5 Classical Albums To Hear Right Now’
A most magical pairing… A Record Of… is a superb collaboration, reconciling jarring contrasts without compromising either party’s own character. It is the dynamic meeting point of pop and experimental, punk and classical minimalism, noisy and hushed, abrasive and smooth, delivered with stark clarity and precision.
The Quietus
Bristling with crazy-paving rhythms and wild melodic tangents, A Record Of… is the duo’s most sonically and stylistically rich work to date
Uncut Magazine
A stroke of genius… For Arone Dyer and Aron Sanchez, the two names behind Buke and Gase which are also well known for their prolific instrument crafting, joining forces with the percussive quartet has translated into an album that will surely remain as one of the most interesting proposals gracing 2021.
Sputnik Music
Caroline Shaw: Narrow Sea; Taxidermy
Nonesuch Records (Jan 2021)
A distinctly American variation of retro-minimalism is Narrow Sea...which takes folksy, 19th-century Sacred Harp hymns and places them in a disorientating environment.
John Lewis, The Guardian
imaginative and expressive works that glide effortlessly between genres... [the] exquisite disc showcases Shaw’s 2017 Narrow Sea, recorded by its outstanding original performers: Sō Percussion, soprano Dawn Upshaw and pianist Gilbert Kalish.
BBC Music Magazine - 'The best classical albums released in 2021 so far'
a glorious combination of faith-filled vocal recordings, traditional modal harmonies and strange percussive and electronic textures
Elizabeth Alker, BBC Radio 3 - Unclassified
An enchanting recording
Alex Burghoorn, De Volkskrant
Shaw composed the five-part Narrow Sea in 2017 for Sō Percussion, a New York-based quartet that deploys a deep kit of rhythmic tools. With an array of drums, blocks, marimbas, vibraphones, and shakers alongside repurposed cans and ceramic bowls, they approximate the sounds of maritime bells, prayer chimes, busy machinery, heartbeats, and distant drones. Even flowerpots are fair game, bringing a pleasant, plunking timbre to the project. The music feels fascinated with approximating the shape-shifting capabilities of water—notes ebb and flow, coursing forward or gently trickling over one another...Even when Sō and Kalish slide into a near-mechanical whir in Narrow Sea’s second part, humanity prevails when the percussionists start to sing, too. Their voices swell upward as sanguine layers of hums, sounds that can only be made by bodies pumping with blood and oxygen.
Pitchfork
A superlative collaboration. A sonic and emotional journey that is fully immersive in its approach.
BBC Radio Scotland - Classics Unwrapped 'Album of the Week'
Stylistic boundaries are twisted out of shape...A melodic setting of 19th century text The Sacred Harp, the five-suite title track embraces wayfaring folk, Dawn Upshaw's powerful voice surfing So Percussion's textures
Mojo, ****
Simply breathtaking [and] works on every conceivable level…So Percussion has an immense arsenal at its disposal…combining this deep reservoir of sonic possibilities with Upshaw’s stunning voice and Kalish’s versatile piano, Narrow Sea packs endlessly creative and deeply textured moments into the song cycle… The combination of sounds that initially seem very much out of place creates a unique patchwork that is almost like the invention of a brand-new style…Disarming and intoxicating. So Percussion, Upshaw and Kalish [are] at the absolute height of their powers.”
PopMatters
Sō Percussion
This group plays with an irresistible vitality
The Washington Post
If percussionists are, as proclaimed elsewhere, the new princes of the realm of virtuosity, then these four young, steel-wristed, Brooklyn-based Yale graduates wear the crown with panache.
The Financial Times
The range of colors and voices that So Percussion coaxes from its menagerie is astonishing and entrancing
Billboard Magazine
This ensemble has set the New York standard for percussion innovation
The New Yorker
The weekend’s electrifying percussion pieces deserve a cheer too. The So Percussion group were a knockout in Steve Reich’s Mallet Quartet…
The Guardian
Sō Percussion have [Steve Reich’s Mallet Quartet] nailed, finding both the inner glow and the outer edge, and never letting the tapestry lapse into the flat or routine
BBC Music Magazine
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