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A repertoire of serious percussion music didn’t really begin to develop until the 1930s, with the emergence of folks like Henry Cowell, Edgard Varese, William Russell, Amadeo Roldán, John Cage, and Lou Harrison. Or so writes composer David Peter Garland in his liner notes for Five American Percussion Pieces (Poon Village), a stunning vinyl-only album by the wonderfully unpredictable Bay Area percussionist William Winant, who was not only a founding member of LA’s Oingo Boingo but a regular collaborator of Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Mike Patton’s Mr. Bungle. (In the new-music realm he’s worked with composers like Alvin Curran, John Zorn, Alvin Lucier, Chris Brown, Anthony Braxton, and Fred Frith, among many others.) The record is something of an artist edition—only 350 copies were pressed, and they come packaged in a stunning hand-screened cover with mitered-corner wooden spines; it’s something you’d want to display. But more than that, it’s something you’d likely want to play.
The album also includes a gorgeously shimmering performance of “Trackings” (1976), a piece by Winant’s CalArts classmate Michael Byron that creates a barrage of ringing, deeply resonant overtones and clanging harmonies with four metallophones. There’s an excerpt from a 1995 recording of the frenetic Curran-tuned cowbell piece “Bang Zoom” and a dynamic reading of Tenney’s minimalist classic “Having Never Written a Note for Percussion” (1971), where sounds produced on tam-tam grow from impossibly gentle to deafeningly violent and back down to imperceptible. The album closes beautifully with the second Harrison piece, a short little meditation that provides a serene departure.
