The union of Man Forever and So Percussion is so natural, it could have been caused by gravity. Both acts seek new sounds and ideas via percussion, and both embrace devout repetition as a tool for finding unbeaten paths. Granted, they’ve arrived at that task from different angles: Man Forever is Oneida drummer Kid Millions alongside many partners from the underground rock world, while So Percussion is a quartet of former Yale grad students who perform works by heavyweights like Steve Reich and David Lang. But both share a vision of percussion as exploratory and expansive rather than supplementary.
In fact, their visions are so expansive that combining them could be too much of a good thing. There’s already a lot to absorb in the respective work of Man Forever and So Percussion, so their big, active sounds might crowd each other, perhaps even cancel each other out. Neither happens on Ryonen, which spreads 30 minutes of music across two tracks. There’s clarity throughout, even when drums overlap and rhythms blur, as well as a precision that gives a sense of purpose to every move. The whole isn’t greater than the sum of its parts; that’d be too much to expect of two entities with such high-quality individual track records. But Ryonen is an engaging first strike.
What makes it engaging is its continual forward motion. Both pieces are loop-based, their cores formed by cycles of percussion that repeat for long stretches. Yet both also make progress, rarely dragged down by the weight of their over-and-over beats. Part of this progress comes from sonic variety: multiple types of drums and cymbals are employed, and one piece requires that each instrument be played "in a different time signature at the same tempo.” But progress also comes in the way participants use energy to create kinetic waves. They’re able to make the same figure sound different through the intensity and force of their playing.
Those waves are most obvious on opener “The Clear Realization,” since the percussion recedes to let in a dreamy voice that sounds uncannily like HEALTH’s Jake Duzsik. Adding singing is an interesting move—I wouldn’t have guessed vocals would have anything to do with this collaboration—and the choice gives dramatic tint to a piece that’s otherwise about physicality. But it also makes “The Clear Realization” oddly light. It’s as if the musicians felt compelled to filter their ideas through something literal like speech, rather than letting the drumming do the talking. The song might be more broadly communicative as a result, but it’s also more generic.
Vocals emerge on Ryonen’s closing title track too, but they come much later in the game, and they’re more about adding texture than taking the lead. The percussion in turn is also more complex and subtle. It begins like a collection of offset drumrolls, but gradually masses into a growling drone, then returns even more pointed and hypnotic than it began. As hummed voices rise with the final percussion climax, “Ryonen” scales heights despite few overt, attention-grabbing changes. In doing so, it gives the collection an ideal ending point: it's both the album's peak and a ramp Man Forever and So Percussion could use to shoot higher, if we’re lucky enough to get a second meeting of these skillful minds.
