John Niekrasz is a percussionist, writer, and improviser based in Portland, Oregon. One half of the experimental duo Methods Body, John's work often plays upon the connection between language and rhythm. His latest piece, Civilipoli, is a 45-minute outdoor sound-art performance developed specifically to be performed through a 16-speaker array spread throughout Lewis and Clark College's Experimental Art Research (EAR) Forest using Sensory Percussion on an acoustic drum set. We caught up with John to learn how this project came about and what role Sensory Percussion played in his unique creative process.

How did you first hear about and get your hands on Sensory Percussion?

I'm an old friend of Max Jaffe's and I’ve followed Ian Chang for a long time. I was aware of this technology, and I think the first time I witnessed it was a performance in around 2017 by the artist Brin. He played one drum and it was very hypnotic trance type stuff.

I was curious about it all. I remember at the time thinking, “Whoa, combining this with language could be really interesting.” My master's is in poetry, so that's kind of the lens through which I compose music. Text is central to my compositions and I just saw a lot of potential there with Sensory Percussion.

In what ways did you use Sensory Percussion to chop up bits of language?

For Civilipoli, I really wanted to use my own writing, so I did these three and four-voice harmony recordings of my own voice. I was interested in how language could be recombined in surprising ways.

I was shown a few things in the software, like putting an LFO on the start time of a sample, that just suddenly made the sample so rich. I can take a phrase that I've known for 10 years and suddenly it’s new to me, and I can combine it with this other phrase and because I don’t know where either of them is going to start, it’s exciting to see what new syntax I can make, what new music I can make with this. I love the real-time surprise of it.

And how did the idea of using a 16-speaker array come about? Was that the intention from the beginning?

I was invited by Jess Perlitz at Lewis and Clark College to be their artist-in-residence and they have this very unique 16-channel speaker system called the EAR Forest. All the speakers are mounted up on trees in the forest and it's the only one in the world—that I know of—that's not arranged in the round. Instead, they’re arranged in a trail through the forest.

Part of the artist-in-residence program is to compose something for this wild system. And I was like, “Heck yes, this is beautiful. How exciting.”

I thought about it and realized I would love to be able to manipulate this system in real time. I'm an improviser and I love the performative potential I saw, as opposed to just pressing play on a track. I had a vision of sitting in the forest and controlling things live. The question was, what would be the control mechanism? I could have a MIDI keyboard or something, but I’m a drummer and I wanted to use the drum set. So that’s how I arrived at incorporating Sensory Percussion.

How was the experience of composing for 16 channels in Sensory Percussion?

It's amazing. I feel like it re-shaped my composer’s brain. There were challenges, but the payoff has been incredible. I feel a little spoiled starting on 16 channels, but yeah, that was my way in, and I think the timing was perfect. Sensory Percussion 2 was still somewhat new, and it has 16 separate output channels. It sounds like the original version didn’t have that capability, so it was all very good timing.

And then even the updates to the program while I was working were all serendipitous. I was like, “Oh, thank God, now there’s a global set and a global stop button." The built-in recording function came at the perfect moment. There's no way we could have recorded all 16 channels without it because of our weird physical setup. But we just pressed 'record' inside of Sensory and now the college can play my composition through the forest whenever they want.

The artist statement for Civilipoli uses the term ‘sono-gestural’. We use the term ‘gesture’ at Sunhouse a lot, since it implies information not just about where you’re hitting the drum, but how you’re hitting the drum. I’m wondering what that term means to you.

Pretty much any sound you play through these speakers is going to be exciting because you're in the woods and surrounded by sound, but I wanted it to be performative, live, gestural. If I hit the rim of the snare drum, it comes out of this speaker here. If I hit the bass drum in this way, it comes out of that speaker over there. And some of the speakers are over 100 feet apart, so, by moving through the forest, the listener can have infinite sonic experiences. To this day, I've still only used Sensory by composing for 16 speakers, which is probably a pretty weird way to be introduced to this technology.

It's funny because I came kicking and screaming to technology. For decades, I've been avoiding electronics in my drum setup, even though I've been asked to incorporate them before. But the expressiveness of the system is what brought me through the back door to this. As soon as I fell into the program, I was like, “Oh, this is useful, this is rad.”

It’s a testament, I think, to Sensory's intuitiveness and human feel, the way that it just explodes the drum set into a full orchestra or a into a set of turntables or into a choir. So, for me, it was like, “Okay, I'm willing to do the work to learn a new program, to spend more time on my laptop.” I usually don’t want to do that, but it was well worth it for me. And I'm surprised. I'm shocked. I still feel like I'm just scratching the surface of this program, which is exciting. I know there's so much more in there.

A lot of Civilipoli is improvised, but there is some structure to the progression of the different sections. Did you go in with an idea of what patterns you would play at certain points, or was it more reacting in real time to what you’re hearing?

For this performance, I built 10 or 11 different Sensory Percussion sets. Some of the compositions for them were hyper-composed, where I knew exactly the trajectory between the strokes and movements. But I’m also an improviser. I like chance and mystery in this stuff, too. And electronics do feel pretty mysterious to me.

Like with the language stuff, I loaded full compositions—like 10-minute songs—as samples. Then I would just play parts of them and use the rim of the kick as a way to cut them off, just to see the different ways the sounds can interact. Being able to control 16 samples at once and telling them when to start and stop exactly, with expression, was a delight. It's a pleasure.

It's really different from my typical playing, too. I mean, I'm playing the kit differently than I ever have in ways that I think are challenging and good for me. I'm a busy player. I like a lot of notes. And that doesn't always work with this material.

Yeah, you don’t play what would be considered a typical drum pattern until about 30 minutes in. Did that take a lot of discipline?

Yeah, ha, exactly right. That was pretty difficult for me. But I think there's a real joy when your brain has to shift to holding the richness and the intensity of the sample sounds as equally important to the physical action of playing. That’s new for me. So yeah, there was a lesson in there. Patience, slowness, letting things land, are all really good things for drummers. It’s good for me to be like, “You don't have to overplay here. This thing's doing its thing. It's lovely.” It’s a similar idea to letting a cymbal ring out, like, “I'm going to let that decay fully before I start something else.”

Going back to the term ‘sono-gestural,’ I'm a dancer, too, and there's an old saying: “No dance in the drummer, no dance in the dancer.” I believe that we are playing time. We are moving our bodies. I love the drum set because it's this whole body experience. There are very few instruments like this. Sensory Percussion is just a natural extension of this. The act of striking a drum can be playful, it can be sweet. It can be dead serious. I think there's meaning in the sound, of course. But there's also meaning in the performance and in the incidentals. I think Sensory is this really powerful hybrid of all those things.

How did performing with Sensory Percussion compare to other solo performances you’ve done on acoustic drums?

Well, for one, I can't leave the drum set and still have sound coming from it if I'm just playing acoustically. But during the performance of this piece, I got up and ran the course a couple of times. And that was so fun. I just got some meaningful layers of looped samples going and then was able to get up and run. And there were 150 people there, so, I was navigating around everyone, but it was really great. Hearing the composition from other places in the forest. People brought their kids and there were professors and college students, a bunch of my friends and family.

Which gets back to the serious vs. playful thing. There were fun moments that kids seemed to enjoy, but also times where the piece made specific references to things a child might not know about.

Totally. The sampling world is so new to me. I'm a writer, and what I've struggled with in drumming is the fact that I love specific information. I love facts and the specificity of language. Like, how can you describe the difference between a Cedar waxwing and a Bohemian waxwing, these two types of birds? I can describe that in writing because language and writing are made for that. But drumming is not great at that. Music's not great at that kind of fact-based specificity, though it does other amazing things.

That's a part of my brain that's always been a little left out of music, but Sensory has been the most organic way to incorporate wide new strata of meaning into my music. I've never had that opportunity before. Engaging with these samples of sound that have either subtle or overt statements with all this emotional subtext attached to them. That's so rich for me. I love that.

Speaking of sounds with subtext attached, I have to ask you about the chainsaw samples. Can you explain how those came to be a part of the piece?

So, five days before the show, Professor Dann Disciglio and I were setting up in the EAR Forest. It was my most important rehearsal day and we got there early in the morning because it's a lot of setup time. We run a 400-foot ethernet cable every single time I set up out there so my system can talk to the speakers.

We get set up, I start playing, and this guy in chaps and a helmet comes up and he's like, “You got to get out of here.” I was like, “What's going on?” and he's like, “We're cutting these three trees down.” And I’m like, “Not ones with the speakers on them, right?” And he's like, “Yeah, those ones.”

And, I'm nobody here; I'm just a visiting artist. So I had to call the professor, who came out and argued with the guy. But the school had okayed it. So, it was wild. We had to take a three hour break and I was bummed. And I mean, these are 150-year-old big leaf maples. They weren't dead, but they had some structural issues.

So the arborists got out their chainsaws to cut these beautiful trees down to the height of the speakers. And Dann and I look at each other and we’re like, “We’re recording this for sure.” I recorded the chainsaws, brought them into Sensory, and added some assignments to try to shape this destructive sound into something else, something with depth and humor. And that’s kind of what my piece Civilipoli is all about: the tension between human culture and the wilderness. And it was happening while I was there.