Before any of the musical gadgetry could be used on night three of the Ecstatic Music Festival at Merkin concert hall, the audience rang the evening’s first notes by singing “Happy Birthday” to So Percussion member Jason Treuting, joyfully absent due to the birth of his child earlier in the day. In jeans and t-shirts, the present members (plus Jason’s skillful stand-in) then gathered around a large bass drum stage right and began the evening with a wonderful introduction to their music: chimes mixed with frenetic drumming rhythms I dare not describe.
The young men were then joined onstage by guitarist Grey McMurray and performed pieces from their Where We Live project. Simply put, various friends and family of the band submit short videos in the intimate format of YouTube, to which the group scores an appropriate number. First, a fellow brushing his teeth was projected onto the large screen behind the stage. The quartet wrote a harmonic and buzzing piece, turning the awkward video of a frothy mouth into a pretty drone of varying proportions. Next was the cutesy video of a baby playing with a bright orange balloon. Fittingly, orange balloons sat idle until they were tossed into the audience, adding the sound of our batting the air-stretched plastic to the beautiful sing-song inspired by an infant.
Two more pieces followed, the first a showcase of Grey McMurray’s guitar as it warbled and synthesized from the stomping of various pedals, the rumble accompanied by birdsong sourced from a computer file. Martin Schmidt of Matmos appeared in the night’s final video projection as the interesting denizen of an audiophile’s basement, his egg-shaking antics appropriated by the five players in a medley of electronic-acoustic wanderings a la the Boredoms. But these musicians come from a background of Bach, Ives, and worldly rhythm, surely a sign that prior giants still influence our present and future networked moment.