Susie Ibarra: Rhythm Cycles (for Drumset)

Saturday, July 27th, ISSUE presents a special “end of season” program gathering three singular artists working across avant-garde rhythmic music. The evening showcases Actress, the alias of British electronic musician and producer Darren J. Cunningham -- widely celebrated for hybridizing known genres within electronic music and operating on the cutting-edge of club culture. Composer, percussionist, and sound artist Susie Ibarra presents “Rhythm Cycles (for Drumset),” while “rhythmanalyst” Speaker Music (DeForrest Brown Jr.) premieres a new piece “Her Velocity; like a foreign (after)image, renders her opaque.”

Susie Ibarra’s “Rhythm Cycles” is a set of pieces that examine rhythm through shifting melody, texture, tempo, polyrhythms, while maintaining cycles. It is both a study and a meditation in rhythm. A virtuosic composer, percussionist and improviser, Ibarra is known for her innovative style and exquisitely global essence, coupling a profound respect for indigenous musics with a unique sense of the avant-garde. Ibarra’s solo performances have been noted for their dynamic range and expressive technique, as well as her incorporation of diverse styles and influences. Her sound has been described as “a sound like no other, incorporating the unique percussion and musical approach of her Filipino heritage with her flowing jazz drumset style,” by Modern Drummer Magazine.

Susie Ibarra is a Filipina-American composer, percussionist, and sound artist. Her compositions are sometimes described as “calling up the movements of the human body; elsewhere it’s a landscape vanishing in the last light, or the path a waterway might trace” (New York Times). Recent commissions include Kronos String Quartet’s 50 for the Future Project Pulsation, PRISM Saxophone Quartet + Percussion’s Procession Along the Aciga Tree, Talking Gong trio with pianist Alex Peh and flautist Claire Chase, film score When the Storm Fades directed by Sean Devlin, and a multimedia game piece Fragility: An Exploration of Polyrhythms for Asia Society. Susie Ibarra is a 2019 United States Artist Fellow in Music. She is a 2018 Asian Cultural Council Fellow in support of her sound research of An Acoustic Story on Climate Change: Himalayan Glacier Soundscapes. She is recording and researching sound along the Ganges from source to sink in collaboration with glaciologist and geomorphologist Michele Koppes. Ibarra leads the DreamTime Ensemble, which recently released the album Perception, a suite of music exploring memory and shifting sensory experiences. In 2017 the album was chosen in in a top ten playlist for the NYTimes and featured in WBGO's Take Five Gives the Drummer Some with featured Drummer-Led records. She performs in collaborative ensembles Mephista, Yunohana Variations, and LIMBS. Always curious about different ways to think about and play rhythm, Susie Ibarra is collaborating most recently with ThinkFun! Games and Splice.com. With ThinkFun Games, Ibarra is inventing an interactive polyrhythm board game to teach rhythms. With Splice.com Sound Samples and launched on Splice Originals a sound sample packet, Experimental Percussion with Susie Ibarra in Dec 2018. In July, 2019 Splice Originals will launch a second sound packet with built e-music instruments to play her percussion sounds. Since 2012, she has been a faculty member at Bennington College where she teaches percussion, drumset, composer /performer ensembles, improvisation, and art intervention. Susie Ibarra is a Yamaha, Vic Firth, and Paiste Drum Artist.