Claire Chase - Susie Ibarra: Talking Gong (2021)

Susie Ibarra is a multi-faceted artist who brings together diverse roles as a composer, percussionist, and creative improviser to produce works that flow fluidly between coloristic textures. The music on Talking Gong exists at the intersection of Filipino traditional music, experimental improvisation, and contemporary chamber music, and features a natural synergy between Ibarra and her collaborators, flutist Claire Chase and pianist Alex Peh.

The album is book-ended by four short Meriendas, translated as “snack” from Filipino. These brief improvisatory pieces take a snapshot of an ensemble mechanism in which each instrument occupies a different space. The first features muted sounds — short articulations and pizzicato notes in the piano, percussive, airy attacks in the flute, and rattles, scratches and light cymbal hits in the percussion. The second is playful, with a famous quote showing up mischievously in the piano while the flute circles around central pitches with trills and the percussion plays rumbling figures on the tom-tom.

The title piece is the centerpiece of the recording, nearly seventeen minutes of music that covers a wide range of sonic territory. A melody in pitched gongs is featured in the spacious, ritualistic opening, as the flute punctuates with muted, tongued notes over a background figure in the piano. A left hand ostinato leads into a rhythmic groove under watery arpeggios before Peh launches into a passage of alternating, repeated block chords. Echoes of the muted sounds from the first Merienda return in the subsequent section, framed by the tolling of a low gong, before Chase’s flute finishes the section with a virtuosic solo of clicks, pops, and fricatives. The groove that follows is more full throated, with Ibarra framing the pulse on the snare drum and the flute fluttering over the top. The piece turns unexpectedly towards sensual, jazz inflected harmonies with rich melodic material in the flute. An airy middle section returns to the meditative spirit of gongs and fragmentary material. Peh’s piano abruptly shatters the reverie with dense low register chords before an impetuous passage of angular rhythmic unisons in the piano and drumset. Talking Gong freely moves between sections, but there are motivic seeds that tie and link them together into a quilt of shared material.

Paniniwala (Belief) is a reflective piano and percussion duet, with expansive voicings and arpeggios reinforced by chimes, cymbals, and atmospheric texture. Dancesteps opens with a repeated two part phrase and reharmonizes it in additive fashion, adding voices and expanding registers before contracting again. Insistent figures on wood blocks support syncopated chords before an ominous pedal point steers the piece towards more rhapsodic piano writing. Bell-like plucked strings inside the piano offer an ethereal melody over a simple accompaniment. The opening phrase returns with registral displacement, clothing familiar music in new garb, before we hear it in its original form once again. Ibarra closes the piece with the poignant, nostalgic music heard in the work’s middle section.

Kolubrí (Hummingbird) gives the listener a wonderful opportunity to hear Ibarra’s sound sculpting in isolation in a solo work for drumset, percussion, and gongs. The piece opens with a distant, low roll as Ibarra steadily brings in higher pitched drums, hi-hat interjections, and off-kilter accents. As the piece evolves, it tilts towards irregular accented figures, brushes on the snare, and disembodied sustained sounds on the cymbals.

The solo work Sunbird employs piccolo, flute, and bass flute, sometimes layered on top of each other. Bird-like calls in the piccolo are answered by percussive material in the C flute and trill bursts. The percolating material occasionally makes way for singing, imitative melodic fragments before a torrent of short, unpitched attacks on all three flutes creates a momentary ecosystem all its own. The piece ends with sighing, pensive figures in the bass flute.

The penultimate Merienda features a resigned harmonic progression accompanying hisses and pops in the flute, while in the final short piece, fleet scalar material in the piano supports undulating whistling and quick cymbal crescendi.

Susie Ibarra’s Talking Gong is an exploration of several spaces — the timbral intersection between three instruments, the delicate juncture between through-composed and improvised, and the fertile interchange of music mined from a variety of sources of inspiration. Throughout, Ibarra’s grounding musical presence asserts itself, guiding the music to produce a final product that is a seamless reflection of its component parts.

- Dan Lippel