Gamelan Son Of Lion, founded in New Jersey by Barbara Benary, represented the arrival of the Woodstock generation upon the gamelan scene. Merging with Fluxus pioneer Phillip Corner & his New Music Performance Group in New York City in 1975, and building in part upon instrument designs by the brilliant but little-known Dennis Murphy, theirs was an Aquarian approach, playful and iconoclastic all at once, for the most part eschewing attempts at replicating traditional Indonesian structures, opting instead for a more wide-open exploration of the sonic possibilities inherent in the gamelan’s wonderful array of metal and percussion.
To Date, locust has reissued two lost releases by the ensemble:the 2 cd set The Complete Gamelan in the New World (re: 2003) collated two legendary recordings first issued on Moe Asch’s Folkways label & 2006’s Metal Notes, which resuscitated a long-lost, decades-old
cassette-only release.
Equally inspired by the resonant decaying sounds of New York school composers like Morton Feldman, the stunning pacific gamelan music of its namesake, the wild antics of Fluxus, & minimal drones, their sound is trancelike and beautifully inspiring.
Founding members include Barbara Benary (early collab w/ Philip Glass), Fluxus pioneer Philip Corner, David Demnitz, Daniel Goode, Peter Griggs, Michael Byron, and half a dozen other composer/performers.
