| Contemporary music |
Murmuration: Percussia turns an unlikely ensemble into a flock in perfect formation
Every autumn, in fields and city skies around the world, flocks of starlings perform one of nature’s strangest and most beautiful tricks: thousands of individual birds banking, folding and reshaping themselves into a single fluid form, no leader visible, no obvious plan, and yet somehow perfectly coordinated. It’s called a murmuration, and it’s an oddly perfect metaphor for what the Queens, New York-based quintet Percussia does on their second album of the same name, five distinct voices, none of them behaving quite like a conventional chamber ensemble, moving together into something genuinely more compelling than any one of them could produce alone.
Percussia’s instrumentation alone tells you this isn’t a group interested in following a template. Founder and percussionist Ingrid Gordon built the ensemble around a lineup that simply doesn’t exist elsewhere in quite this configuration: percussion (Gordon and Frank Cassara), flute (Margaret Lancaster), harp (Susan Jolles), and viola/fadolín (Ljova), with soprano Melissa Fogarty joining as guest voice for the album’s closing suite. Following their acclaimed 2024 debut Plucked and Struck, built around the more compact pairing of harp and Orff percussion, Murmuration expands to the group’s full complement, and the payoff is a considerably richer, more varied palette than the debut could offer.
What holds all of that variety together is a shared sense of adventure rather than any single stylistic identity. Gordon has described the guiding spirit of the group simply as curiosity, a desire to keep discovering new combinations of sound rather than settling into a signature style, and that restlessness is audible from the very first bars of the album.
Composer Alexis Lamb’s three-part title work sits at the album’s centre, and it earns that placement. Commissioned after Gordon and Jolles discovered a published Lamb duo and asked for something written for the full group, “Murmuration” translates the birds’ aerial choreography into genuinely vivid musical terms: restless, interlocking rhythms in the first movement, a more lyrical drift in the second as flute and harp entwine, and a closing movement that lets percussion and strings trade the kind of quick, overlapping phrases that really do suggest a flock reshaping itself mid-flight. It’s a lovely piece of writing, and a well-chosen anchor for the whole record.
Around it, Murmuration plays almost like a career retrospective for the group, what the band themselves have called a set of “greatest hits”. Bill Clark’s three-movement “Moiré”, one of Percussia’s earliest original commissions, opens the album with a shifting, pattern-based charm built on harp and mallet percussion in close dialogue. The reimagined “Espejismos”, originally written by Carlo Nicolau and reworked here to showcase Margaret Lancaster’s flute playing, is a colourful, dance-inflected showpiece that gives the whole ensemble room to stretch. Matthew Welch’s “Variasi Ombak” pulls off one of the record’s more unlikely fusions, threading Scottish Highland bagpipe idioms together with Balinese gamelan textures into something that feels genuinely dreamlike rather than merely eclectic for its own sake.
The closing suite, Dennis Tobenski’s six-movement “Starfish at Pescadero”, adds soprano Melissa Fogarty to the mix for a setting of poet Idris Anderson’s reflective, beach-set verse, and it gives the album a genuinely different emotional register at the end, more narrative, more vulnerable, closing out a record that’s spent most of its runtime in purely instrumental conversation.
The album’s most personal piece deserves special attention: “On the Street Where I Live”, a four-movement suite written by the ensemble’s own violist and fadolín player, Ljova. It’s worth pausing on Ljova himself for a moment, because his own story is genuinely remarkable. Born Lev Zhurbin in Moscow in 1978 to composer Alexander Zhurbin and writer Irena Ginzburg, he moved to New York with his family in 1990 and trained at Juilliard under Samuel Rhodes, violist of the Juilliard String Quartet. Since then he’s built one of the more genre-defying careers in contemporary string playing, commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, Brooklyn Rider and Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, leading his own group Ljova and the Kontraband, and appearing as a session violist on Saturday Night Live, The Late Show with David Letterman and The Tonight Show. He’s also one of the leading champions of the fadolín, a six-string hybrid of violin and viola whose deeper, darker register gives his own writing a distinctive coloration nobody else on the contemporary chamber scene quite has access to.
That background makes “On the Street Where I Live” land with real weight. Composed as a reflection on life in New York City during the pandemic, its four movements move from the eerie, siren-like interplay of flute and mallet percussion on “The Never-ending Ambulances”, through the anxious, quietly hopeful “Help Somebody!”, into the more grounded, shaker-driven groove of “Gas Nign (Street Tune)”, before closing on “Desperate Measures”, where Ljova’s own high, piercing viola lines carry the piece’s most raw emotional charge. It’s a genuinely affecting piece of writing precisely because it never over-explains itself, the anxiety and the tenderness are both there in the sound, not appended as commentary.
The rest of the ensemble deserves real credit here too. Harpist Susan Jolles has spent decades as one of new music’s most in-demand collaborators, and her playing throughout gives even the record’s busiest moments a real sense of clarity and shape, and flutist Margaret Lancaster brings the same fearless, genre-crossing curiosity to this record that’s defined her long career as a champion of new and experimental repertoire.
Murmuration is a warm, richly varied, genuinely inventive record from a group willing to build its own instrumentation from scratch rather than inherit one. Not every piece here reaches quite the same heights, the album covers a lot of stylistic ground across its 71 minutes, and a few of the shorter movements function more as connective tissue than as fully independent statements, but the overall experience is consistently engaging, beautifully played, and anchored by two genuinely memorable centrepieces in Lamb’s title suite and Ljova’s deeply personal “On the Street Where I Live”. A great, rewarding listen from one of Neuma Records’ most quietly original ensembles.
Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE
PARIS-MOVE, September 16th, 2026
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Album on Neuma Records’ website
Musicians:
Ingrid Gordon: percussion
Frank Cassara: percussion
Margaret Lancaster: flute
Susan Jolles: harp
Ljova: viola, fadolín
Melissa Fogarty: soprano
Tracklisting:
1.Bill Clark: Moiré – Fast But Relaxed 02:43
2.Bill Clark: Moiré – Slow 03:27
3.Bill Clark: Moiré – Flowing 02:23
4.Carlo Nicolau, arr. Percussia: Espejismos 10:55
5.Alexis Lamb: Murmuration I 05:10
6.Alexis Lamb: Murmuration II 03:42
7.Alexis Lamb: Murmuration III 02:39
8.Ljova: On the Street Where I Live – The Never-ending Ambulances 04:02
9.Ljova: On the Street Where I Live – Help Somebody! 01:32
10.Ljova: On the Street Where I Live – Gas Nign (Street Tune) 03:14
11.Ljova: On the Street Where I Live – Desperate Measures 04:59
12.Matthew Welch: Variasi Ombak – Kawitan 01:46
13.Matthew Welch: Variasi Ombak – Urlar 02:30
14.Matthew Welch: Variasi Ombak – Siubhal 02:43
15.Matthew Welch: Variasi Ombak – Gambangan 03:37
16.Dennis Tobenski: Starfish at Pescadero – I have not loved you in all seasons 02:57
17.Dennis Tobenski: Starfish at Pescadero – Cliffs and coves are also gold 03:23
18.Dennis Tobenski: Starfish at Pescadero – And the hills over which we have driven 01:43
19.Dennis Tobenski: Starfish at Pescadero – I’m being silly on our walk up the beach 02:16
20.Dennis Tobenski: Starfish at Pescadero – I reach into the tidal pool 03:40
21.Dennis Tobenski: Starfish at Pescadero – Down Pescadero Beach we climb 01:47
