CD Reviews

So Percussion

Where (we) Live

music by Grey McMurray

Cantaloupe Records

• This Place the Place
• Five Rooms Back
• Strange Steps
• Moat
• Room and Board
• In Our Rooms
• All Along
• Strangers All Along
• Five Rooms Down
• Thank You

So Percussion: Eric Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, Jason Treuting; Guitar and vocals: Grey McMurray

Where (we) Live, a collaborative composition/performance/event by Grey McMurray and So Percussion, does everything in its power to communicate a sense of place and space. The first track sets McMurray as the leader of a guided meditation asking the listener to think about various places he/she has lived and how it felt to move into a new place. It is the kind of metaphor one might expect someone to build a piece around but it is a narrative which would require ample program notes (and listeners who would read them) in order to communicate the piece’s true intent. McMurray cuts right through that and after 20 seconds, you know exactly what he is shooting at. Even before his narration comes in, though, we get a sense of space. The scratchy LP sounds and the distant piano recording established a sense of space and mood immediately. Being asked to think of the places we’ve lived just takes us deeper inside.

So Percussion and McMurray keep all details focused on mood, tone, and event throughout the disc. All details, from subtle timbres to large formal designs, all point back to the whole composition. Even a track like “Moat,” which contains some jarring shifts from loud and percussive moments quickly dropping into subdued delicate textures all seem to convey the very idea of what a moat is and what it does: a drastic shift in the landscape meant to isolate one thing from another. As this particular track continues, the disparate elements are unified into one cohesive unit.

“Room and Board” walks that fine line between a work for narrator and ensemble and a story on This American Life with a slightly more exuberant soundtrack. “All Along” is a straight-up groove for a while but gives way to spare electric piano chords at the end. While the disc has a mostly ambient sound world about it, So Percussion gets plenty of rhythmic and driving moments to contrast the pointallistic and quieter moments. Everything blends so well together, every sound is so perfectly chosen, each component is exactly where it needs to be.

It can be difficult to talk about this disc as a collection of tracks or songs. Where (we) Live is a complete and unified whole. It is equal parts groove and sparse points, equal parts spoken and sung, equal parts soloist feature and ensemble playing, equal parts acoustic and electronic, equal parts of all things. It isn’t casual listening, either. I can’t have this on in the background. It becomes the foreground, takes over my listening space, and puts me in its world. When the disc is playing, it is where I live.