I went to see this show with a bunch of other ITP students. Matmos is a very interesting duo (with occasional collaborators) that works with found sound and samples, using it produce music with a pointed political sentiment. So Percussion started out as an avantgarde percussion quartet, mostly playing the works of other composers, but now starting ot compose and perform their own works.
The concert was really beautiful: first, So Percussion performed alone, showing short films made by the sister of one of the musicians, then they performed together with Matmos. A particularly beautiful moment was when So Percussion played their drums with huge bunches of roses, making a muffled, yet oddly hypnotic, sound while rose petals flew everywhere.
The encore, which is rapidly acquiring a kind of notoriety, involved Matmos reading the text of Hugo Chavez’s speech at the UN calling George W. Bush “the devil”, while So Percussion played excerpts from Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring“, a fascinating juxtaposition of two possible views of American values.