Lukas Ligeti writes of his recent work with solo percussion and electronic percussion:
"Several years ago, I started developing a new way of playing drums based on choreographical patterns of movement. This method, derived from ideas in Amadinda xylophone music of the Kingdom of Buganda, long lost in what is now Uganda, enables me to play extremely complex polymetric structures that take a very long time -- hundreds of beats -- until they repeat. Trying to notate what I was doing, I came up with a tabulature notation for drumset. Recently, I've also been trying to integrate this way of playing into group improvised contexts, with African traditional musicians as well as with improvisors from a more `Western'/jazz-based background. Also in recent months, I have started getting more intensively into playing electronic percussion. I ask myself: how will playing this instrument change possibilities of percussion playing (I certainly don't want to use it to recreate my `normal' drum set)? And how can I expand on my drum solo ideas by playing electronics? Using the powerful software of my drumKAT, I can REALLY expand them! Soon, I was able to play a pattern that would run, as I have calculated, for 75000 years before the first repetition! (Don't worry, I won't play the entire piece at Beanbender's.)
"But pieces based on this motion-pattern-technique aren't the only thing I'll play at my solo concert. You can expect influences of Mandingue music as well as of Korean and Chinese, a wide range of sounds not in any way limited to percussive ones, sudden and strange changes of tempo and meter and grooves that seem to collapse at any moment but somehow manage to stay alive...or not.
"I performed two pieces from this program (electronic drums only) at a concert at Stanford in February. In March, I played a newer version of the program, running for about 40 minutes and using both acoustic and electronic drums, at a world music festival in Vienna, where I performed on a double-bill with Hamza el-Din. At Beanbender's, my performance will also run for about 40 minutes and feature both electronics and drum-set; it'll be a further-developed version of the program I've played in Vienna; since all pieces are to a certain (fairly large) extent improvised, I discover them anew, along with the audience, at every performance."
-- Lukas Ligeti