The New York Times: One Composer, Four Players, ‘Seven Pillars’

The New York Times
By Zachary Woolfe

Andy Akiho’s 11-part, 80-minute new work for percussion quartet is a lush, brooding celebration of noise.

The industrial stretch of south Brooklyn where Sandbox Percussion makes its home was nearly silent on a cool, clear Sunday afternoon at the end of September. Not so inside, where the Sandbox quartet had put in earplugs to rehearse Andy Akiho’s clangorous “Seven Pillars,” a lush, brooding celebration of noise.

Akiho, 42, an increasingly in-demand composer who rose as a steel pan virtuoso, sat watching, with a surfer’s laid-back demeanor but intently focused. He isn’t part of the group, but over the years has grown so close with its members, and has spent so much time in their studio, that he installed an espresso machine to fuel his work marathons there.

“That’s my bedroom,” he said, pointing to a tiny soundproofed recording space walled off in the corner.

Akiho has written substantial works for steel pan, for percussion, for marimba and string quartet, for snare drum and sampled dog barking, and many other configurations — even a concerto for onstage Ping-Pong players and orchestra. But “Seven Pillars” is a breakthrough for him, in its 80-minute length and its conceptual complexity.

Read more here.