Against the conventional approach to percussion, with simple gear and canonical sound sets, this playlist aims to show how multifarious and exhilarating are the potentially unbounded resources of unconventional drumming.

Virtually every object can be transformed into a percussive source, since everything has a hidden voice, with its timbre, its beat, its extension, its field of reverberations. To listen to this hidden voice, to let it resonate in all its unpredictable syntax, to be the medium of its expression both as a performer and as a listener, is a synaesthetic experience through which we are confronted with the tactility of sound.

Rather than focusing on a musician’s skills, unconventional drumming is focused on texture, the substrate from which the sound is originated. Unconventional drumming could mean experimenting with the usual drum kit, or modified or implemented with unusual percussion, sometimes from the repertory of traditional music.

Often with unconventional drumming the sonic sources are objets trouvés – the performance becomes the building of resounding merzbau or the recollection of some lost, pristine landscape. In other cases, the choice is for everyday objects or elements that become the ally’s voice in surges of emotions, endurance or outcry.

Enzo Del Re
“Lavorare Con Lentezza”

Directly from Puglia, the region of southern Italy where I come from, the great old man of Italian protest music plays his legendary chair in one of his signature pieces: a hymn to working slow where the precise sociopolitical message finds its fitting ally in the blunt beats from one of the humblest objects of the everyday life.

Roberto De Simone/Nuova Compagnia Di Canto Popolare
“Secondo Coro Delle Lavandaie”

The “Second Chorus Of The Washerwomen”, from the musical La Gatta Cenerentola, is another protest song from Neapolitan folklore. Once again, the ravishing rhythm and the telluric sonority produced by the synergy of traditional instruments and ordinary tools bolster the message. The outcome is totally compelling, an outburst of insurrectionary energy. Every rock band would feel diminished by the evocative power of this percussive ensemble.

Tomoko Sauvage
“Waterbowls”

A dreamy alchemy of watery nuances from a well-balanced mixture of natural elements, ceramics and electronics. The potentiality of materials is unfolded through the mastery of measured gestures, concurring to the creation of unpredictable aural architectures.

Bow Gamelan Ensemble

Anne Bean, Paul Burwell and Richard Wilson’s group was a great example of the evocative power of unconventional drumming with other instruments and devices, stressing intrinsic links with the urban environment. Theirs is a scattered, strident elegy to the life of the working class. The introductory few lines in the video, broadcast in the UK in 1984 on Television South West, neatly summarise the peculiarity of this astounding ensemble.

Julian Sartorious
“Basel – Kleinlützel”

An incisive fragment from an experimental sound collage that maps Switzerland from Basel to Geneva, assembled by Julian Sartorious during his journey in search of sound sources found en route. Tree trunks, hiker turnstiles, empty silos, dry corn stalks – everything has its beat, its voice.

Camille Emaille
“In A Landscape”

More than sketching a sonic landscape, the unconventional drumming of Camille Emaille – that is, her unconventional, radical way to play a slightly modified drum kit – tells us of the risks and awkwardness of finding ourselves dislocated. Her music, often incorporating wire, metal tins, bowls and more, presents an experience of systematic diversions with accidental epiphanic events.

Harry Partch
“Castor & Pollux”

The master of so many unconventional approaches to musical instruments. This seminal classic composition for a large ensemble, taken from Plectra & Percussion Dances, is still compelling.

Han Bennink
“Cheese Kit Diptych”

There is not much to add about this, but no playlist of unconventional percussion would be complete without this 2005 installation made by Walter Willems specially for Dutch percussion master Han Benninck, at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto. Many of the cheeses used in the performance are Dutch.

Valentina Magaletti performs at Krakow’s Unsound festival from October 13–17 as part of Nicholas Jaar’s ongoing Weavings project. Subscribers can read Sam Davies’s review in The Wire 443 of a performance at London's Cafe Oto via our online archive