Toca Loca

Since their inception in 2001, Toca Loca has been furiously branding the cattle of the new music world, and has long been held up as the best argument against intelligent design. Sworn enemies of actuaries and slow-growth fund managers the world over, percussionist Aiyun Huang and pianists Simon Docking and Gregory Oh have introduced North American audiences to new works of Chris Paul Harman, Andrew Staniland, Hywel Davies, Inouk Demers, Heinz Holliger, Sofia Gubaidulina, Philippe Leroux, Toshio Hosokawa, Georges Aperghis and Valerio Sannicandro.----------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------ -------------------------------------------------- Frequent contributors to the CBC’s Two New Hours and ensemble-in-residence at Toronto’s Music Gallery, they have recently been spotted at the Sound Symposium in St. John’s, in Los Angeles as Provost Distinguished Visitors at USC and at the Chapelle historique du Bonpasteur in Montreal. They will appear in March on the CBC’s OnStage series at the Glen Gould Studio, and also in Winnipeg, Edmonton, Montreal and Halifax, presenting The P*P Project. Other upcoming appearances include the Cool Drummings festival in May 2008, The Aperghis Project and Music for 6008 Spokes in June 2008, and a run of XXX Live Nude Girls, an opera for Barbie dolls by Jennifer Walshe.--------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------ -----------------------------------------------Their shadowy doppelgangers have also played the underground in Toronto via the Wavelength Indie Music Series and the X-Avant Festival, and in NYC on the Wordless Music Series at the Lincoln Centre. During the last SoundaXis festival, they were offered twenty dollars by a merchant’s personal assistant to stop playing on the trendy corner of Queen and John in Toronto. They accepted.-------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------ -----------------------------------------------“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 posse of like-minded friends, they put on a passionate, disciplined performance that at times rocked harder than many shows I've heard in clubs.”-Robert Everett-Green, The Globe and Mail, May 29, 2007------------ ------------------------------------------------------------ -----------------------------------------------“The ensemble Toca Loca offered a vibrant short set of works by Georges Aperghis, Dai Fujikura, Louis Andriessen, and Andrew Staniland.”-Alex Ross, The New Yorker, April 16, 2007-------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------ -----------------------------------------------“(Toca Loca Artistic Director) Oh is clearly on his way, through performances, commissioning and programming, to making a lasting contribution to new music in this country.”–Tamara Bernstein, National Post, February 28, 2005--------------------------