Stone Forest Ensemble

The Stone Forest Ensemble is a Classical/World Music/Hip-Hop fusion, whose core consists of Jie-Song Zhang (Emcee and Electric Violinist), Alex "Krussia" Kalnev (Beatboxer), Varuni Tiruchelvam (Cellist), and Joshua Benson (multi-faceted percussionist).
SFE at The Orpheum Theater, Los Angeles (Kollaboration LA 2008)
[E.Violin/Emcee, Cello, Beatbox, Djembe, Pipa]
Krussia Solo ~ Jie-Song Freestyle
Our project is a cry of life lifting from ground to sky in the city of New York, a fire fueled by the bits and pieces of hardship, vigor, spirit, and love at passion buried into the streets of the mighty city, marked across the surfaces of its weathered walls, beaming as the vertical radiance of towers fashioned to cut the sky above street-lights standing guard alongside the feverish marching forward of humanity below. The Stone Forest Ensemble is the people of New York City as a symbol of the people of the world.
SFE on NY1
New York City, like none other in civilization's record, can be seen as a point of arrival for the history of the world. It is a place where the years that precede us and the stories written by those years have come to converge. From each part of the world and its extending history, people have come, with their God and gods, their ways of raising children, their manners of dining and celebration, their values and beliefs – the patterns of reality's form ingrained into their particular sets of eyes – to gather in one place and contribute the prints of their hands and feet into the foundation of what is one city. New York City is a current and prominent chapter in the world's collection of ideas, a place where humanity assertively and proudly demonstrates to itself that which it has become.
Stone Forest Ensemble is a vocal and unique piece of this statement – this expression of what the world and its people have become and are still longing to become. We are a sampled collection of the many ancestries that have flowed as rivers in the shaping of the terrain that is today's reality; individuals made by differing traditions and ideologies, meeting from varied corners of the world's thinking into the space of one thought, the harmony of one statement. In us is the blood of the Asian Empire, the silken strands of the Ancient East, the elegance of the Middle Eastern Legacy, the pride of the African Lineage, the waving flags of the European Tradition. In us is the elongating cry of the String Symphony, the driving momentum of the Middle Eastern and African Percussion, the weighted meditation of the Traditional Asian Instruments, the rebellion and tenacity of the Hip-Hop voice. In us is the face of the old world that has become new.
STONE FOREST ENSEMBLE @ KOLLABORATION NYC '06
(Grand Champion Performance)
(Supper Club, NYC 2006)