Stirring Sound Worlds
In a recent performance of RITWAL, her composition for the 2021 UnDrum festival in Montreal, Filipinx composer, drummer, percussionist, and sound artist Susie Ibarra mixed Western drums and Filipino percussion for an arresting 35-minute aural journey. Exploring extended techniques and indigenous rhythms, she created sounds that buzzed, quaked, surged, heaved, pealed, sighed, and swooned, providing flashes of tranquility and aggression, solace and suppleness. One moment they recalled the natural beauty of a rainforest at dawn, the next a ceremonial procession, the next a Krautrock-ish mechanical pulse. Ibarra’s innovations dissolve divides and unite cultures.
The Anaheim, California’s native’s accolades and achievements are many: 2020 National Geographic (Fine Arts Foundation and TED Countdown on Climate Change), with glaciologist/geographer Michele Koppes. Her for solo drum set was commissioned by the Bagri Foundation in 2020. With flutist Claire Chase, she created an urban soundwalk app for Digital Sanctuaries Harvard. Ibarra has composed for the Kronos Quartet; a performance game piece, , for her DreamTime Ensemble; the recent album by the trio of the same name (New Focus); and the extended composition , filmed for the Asia Society Triennial 2021 with an upcoming premiere at MASS MoCA.
