Touki Delphine
SUPERDRUM X
“A hundred unique heartbeats that together create ominous and wondrous rhythms” – de Volkskrant
The drum is a primal instrument. For thousands of years, people have used rhythm to communicate: across long distances, with their surroundings, and with spiritual worlds.
With SUPERDRUM X, boundary-pushing Dutch collective Touki Delphine taps into this primal force. Making its world premiere at PS21 as part of Commonground Festival, SUPERDRUM X repurposes more than one hundred drums, sourced from the local community via a myriad of second-hand ways, creating one giant interconnected self-playing machine.
Each night, a spectacular guest drummer will accompany the self-playing installation, bringing new exciting flavor to each performance:
Friday, September 4: Lesley Mok, composer and jazz percussionist
Saturday, September 5 & Sunday, September 6: Brian Chase, composer and drummer for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Monday, September 7: Booker Stardrum, composer, improviser, and drummer for SML
The drums are fitted with lights, controlled by electronics, and struck by twigs and sticks collected from the woods of PS21. Each drum has a different shape, size, and timbre, and tells the story of their previous lives through their dents, band logos, and discolorations.
Developed partially in residency at PS21, the work blends groundbreaking techniques from the modern avant-garde with world music, playing with sound masses: layers of sound that form a dense, living texture. It sounds like Steve Reich interrupted by a swarm of bees, Caroline Shaw writing for A Roomful of Drums, or Edgard Varèse interpreted by a hundred woodpeckers.
SUPERDRUM X leaves the spectator under a blanket of rhythm with a refreshed sense of time, and the feeling that they’ve taken part in a ritual communication with another world, whether that be of the digital or the spiritual form. Or likely a little of both.
Commonground is PS21’s annual free festival of contemporary spectacle, where renowned international artists explore the boundaries of what’s physically possible in surprising and participatory performances across PS21’s grounds. Commonground is a family-friendly celebration of the end of summer, welcoming the whole community to PS21 to be dazzled by the performing arts.
This year’s festival features the world premiere of SUPERDRUM X, a work featuring 100 self-playing drums by Dutch musical collective Touki Delphine. Plus: the world premiere of FIELD, a new performance by OBIE award-winning director, writer, and electronics artist Andrew Schneider, Sayer Mansfield’s DIVE BARN, and more.
Amsterdam-based Touki Delphine (Bo Koek, Rik Elstgeest, Chris Doyle and John van Oostrum) is a boundary-pushing collective of musicians, performers, and visual artists making waves nationally and internationally with their monumental light and sound installations made from recycled materials. Their work creates poetic encounters between humans and machines. Inspired by natural phenomena, the climate crisis and the idea of nature as a living whole, they explore how technology can not only alienate but also connect.
Touki Delphine is known for transforming discarded materials into powerful musical installations. In FIREBIRD, a unique orchestra of over 600 recycled taillights unleashes a hypnotic choreography of light and sound, transforming Stravinsky’s classic Firebird Suite into an otherworldly experience. In RELAY, 1848 turn signal relay motors create rhythm and harmony. In MACHINE, a second hand plant-potting machine is transformed into the drummer of an ensemble. For TRANSMISSION, miles of scrapped wiring and pneumatic tubing mimic an underground fungal network that hums and vibrates electrically. And DRIFTING, the breakout hit of the 2025 Dutch festival summer, is a new ecosystem built from nothing but waste: ethernet cables from thrift shops, windshield washer fluid reservoirs and their pump motors from junkyards, and salvaged speaker cables from Touki’s own studio. The piece comes alive in live sessions, where musicians engage in dialogue with the installation.
Lesley Mok is a New York City-based percussionist and sound artist. Their work is guided by a continual search for the connection between the mundane and the divine, the experience and manipulation of time, and a desire to capture emotional dissonance and complexity. Lesley is inspired by American experimental music as informed by the lineage of the AACM, sounds and textures from the natural environment, Afro-Cuban folkloric traditions, drumline, and songwriters and composers like Arthur Russell and Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Lesley’s ongoing explorations with composition and improvisation are most notably documented in their debut album The Living Collection (released May 2023 on American Dreams Records). The album, described as “an exquisite and stimulating work” by All About Jazz and “a singularly personal statement” by Jazz Trail Magazine, was named International Debut Album of the Year at the 2024 Deutscher Jazz Preis. Their solo LP transient will be released in July 2026 on American Dreams Records.
Brian Chase, a Brooklyn-based drummer and sound artist, plays for Grammy-nominated rock band Yeah Yeah Yeahs, NYC’s experimental music community and his solo project, Drums and Drones. As a versatile performer, music has taken him across the world to such notable stages as the Sydney Opera House, Royal Albert Hall and Hollywood Bowl as well as countless independent art spaces of music’s ‘underground’ communities. In 2018, Chase started Chaikin Records, an independent record label which spotlights pioneering figures of the avant-garde. The inaugural release on Chaikin Records was Drums and Drones: Decade, a triple album with 144 page book, described in The Wire as “an indispensable statement on how drummers hear sound.” Additional releases featuring Chase on Chaikin Records include albums with harpist Zeena Parkins, pianist Anthony Coleman, saxophonist Catherine Sikora and a collaboration with visual artist Keti Kartveli. As an educator Chase has taught at Bennington College and was a guest artist at So Percussion’s SoSI festival and Yarn/Wire’s summer institute. Chase’s writings have appeared in John Zorn’s Arcana series, culture blog Talkhouse and drumming trade magazine Modern Drummer. For more info visit chasebrian.com and chaikinrecords.com.
Booker Stardrum is a composer, drummer/percussionist, and producer. Stardrum has been involved with countless experimental and improvisational collaborations, pop projects, film scores, and sound design productions, and has released four solo records (’Close-up On The Outside’ in 2026, ‘Crater’ in 2021, ‘Temporary etc.’ in 2018, and ‘Dance And’ in 2015). Stardrum’s music is a highly personal amalgamation of electro-acoustics, minimalism, ambient, jazz, and contemporary experimental electronic music. His compositions are sculptural, carved from the dense layering of instruments and manipulated samples, a pantonal harmonic sense, and an intuitive approach to rhythm.
Stardrum’s collaborators include SML, Play Time, Lisel, Photay, Horse Lords, Wendy Eisenberg, Amirtha Kidambi, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Chris Williams, Patrick Shiroishi, Carl Stone, Lee Ranaldo, and Nels Cline. His discography includes solo and collaborative releases on independent labels such as International Anthem, We Jazz, Balmat, NNA Tapes, Northern Spy Records, Mexican Summer, Suddenly Quarterly, and Luminelle.
Booker lives in the Hudson Valley in New York State.
Installation | John van Oostrum
Composition and music | Bo Koek, Rik Elstgeest and Chris Doyle
SUPERDRUM was created in collaboration with Veenfabriek.
With funding from Performing Arts Fund NL
This project is possible thanks to lead support from the GKV Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Performing Arts Fund NL.
Additional support is provided by Hudson River Bank & Trust, Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, Ackerman Foundation, Upstate Theater Coalition for a Fair Game, and Childrens Foundation for Columbia County.
