RITO — Islands Above, Roots Below

​RITO | Islands Above, Roots Below

​Three islands stand apart in the room. On each, a member of RITO, a London-based collective reimagining Korean tradition as contemporary ritual, holds a different musical dialect.

​In Korean traditional music, tori is the melodic grammar of a region: the way a place bends a note, carries a breath, holds its memory in sound. Each tori belongs somewhere. In this session, RITO places these dialects on separate islands and lets the space between them become the sea, a body of sound where signals travel, voices cross, and boundaries begin to dissolve.

​Through piri, Korean percussion and live electronics, the journey moves from arrival to descent to convergence. A blessing chant offers good fortune to the homes of those gathered. Rhythms from samulnori invite the room to move as one. Three poems surface between and within the music, like messages passed from shore to shore.

​Above the water, we are islands. Beneath it, we may share the same roots.

​RITO: EDITH (voice, synthesizer), KANGSAN (percussion), SEAYOOL (piri, percussion)