Susie Ibarra & Roberto Rodriguez: Electric Kulintang

Show Description

"Eight small round gongs lie horizontally in a rectangular box and shimmer to the touch of soft wooden sticks. The sound is intricate, playful, liquid, the tuning flexible and untethered to a specific scale. Now hand drums weave in, offering a loose countervailing beat. A laptop beams loops and samples from field recordings: traditional music groups, children at play, street noise, a call to prayer taped off a hazy transistor radio.

This is the soundscape of Electric Kulintang, the venture of wife-and-husband team Susie Ibarra and Roberto Rodriguez that conjugates her Filipino and his Cuban cultural heritage with the experimentalism of the New York improvised music scene they inhabit. Deeply rooted yet entirely new, it is one of those refreshing projects that ushers the listener into a total sonic experience just past the edge of the familiar, in the process subjecting the superannuated concept of ‘‘world music’’ to some much-needed creative destruction."  - Siddhartha Mitter, Boston Globe

Electric Kulintang performs an evening of original music in collaboration with the poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa, War Horses, and Luis Francia , No One Knows The Wilderness.