...the standout piece was local drum troupe Fringe Percussion’s reading of Xenakis’s Persephassa, from 1969, for which the musicians—joined by Montreal virtuoso Aiyun Huang—were placed around the perimeter of the room, surrounding the audience. Perhaps because of his training as an architect, Xenakis was very interested in the spatialization of music, and in this work the sound sometimes circles the room, with motifs passed from player to player in a way that prefigured the multispeaker audio installations that would follow. It’s an intentionally immersive piece, so explosive that at times it sounded like we were crouching on a battlefield, and the musicians delivered it with split-second precision.
The Montreal Percussion Ensemble created something of a sensation in the Dunn Theatre Thursday night at the Second Highlight Concert of the 2011 Scotia Festival of Music. After stunning audiences with the concentrated rhythmic macrame of Steve Reich’s Sextet during Tuesday’s opening concert, they produced a lighthearted set of polyrhythmic knots and splices with tin juice cans, a potpourri of shakers and woodblocks, a conch shell, several drums including a bass drum and a lion’s roar, a suspended tenor drum with a cord dangling below it that is pulled slowly downward with a resin glove to live up to its name. The ensemble’s delightful play of timbres and tones, anchored by three sets of bongos and congas, made us all feel like five-year-olds discovering the thrill of furiously beating on a can or running about whacking anything that pops or tingles. But it was serious fun, to quote Dartmouth composer Paul Cram, which was contrived by John Cage, America’s most famous enfant terrible, as his Third Construction for Percussion Quartet.

We appreciated its whimsy while listening with awe to the ensemble’s marvelous energy and concentration. The musical texture was produced by notated polyrhythmic phrases performed in different orders chosen by each player. It and other such works influenced minimalists like Reich and Philip Glass to develop their own musical vocabularies of repeated phrases offset from one another to phase in and out, overlapping and lining up with the pulse, now on it, now off it.


Whether playing gloom-pop or performance-art rant, Toca Loca’s Gregory Oh, Simon Docking, and Aiyun Huang are known for their edge-of-seat intensity.


Recent recipients of a glowing shout-out from The New Yorker, Toca Loca’s performance Friday (July 25) stands to be an explosive, brain-busting highlight of the fest.


Toca Loca’s masterful presentation of their P*P Project at the Glenn Gould Studio.…The musicianship of the trio is really unprecedented. Percussionist Aiyun Huang and pianists Simon Docking and Gregory Oh are the country’ best kept weapons of mass destruction…Seriously "Stevie", forget about the funding of new tanks and choppers...feed these three mouths until they stop breathing, PLEASE!!! TOCA LOCA do justice to the idea of genre inclusiveness in modern art music.


Toca Loca’s style is no easier to describe, although it’s fair to say that most of what they play is highly kinetic and abstract.


Toca Loca has its own delightful, quirky style. It would also be tough to find a new-music group with more integrity than this Toronto-based trio…mixture of electrifying performances, free-spirited curiosity, discerning musical taste and a whimsical sense of humour has made it an irresistible presence on the new-music scene since its birth in 2001.


Toca Loca is made up of some serious musical muscle…Toca Loca has a sense of fun…. Not limited to two pianos and percussion, the group draws many elements into their sound-from backing electronics and bizarre effect-pedals to spoken word performances and rap. At any given show, Huang’s percussion could involve traditional drums or veer into vibes, anvils or smashing glass.


Two pianos and two percussionists delivered the highly rhythmic score flawlessly.


Toca Loca are a trio (pianists Gregory Oh and Simon Docking, and percussionist Aiyun Huang) who clearly believe that contemporary music should grab the listener as much as any other kind. With a pose of liked-minded friends, they put on a passionate, disciplined performance that at times rocked harder than many shows I’ve heard in clubs.


The ensemble Toca Loca offered a vibrant short set of works by Georges Aperghis, Dai Fujikura, Louis Andiessen, and Andrew Staniland.

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