Ninth Planet New Music is a San Francisco-based new music ensemble that commissions and performs new music. This group was merged from the Bay Area groups Wild Rumpus and Composers, Inc., and Ed Garcia began playing percussion with Wild Rumpus in 2013. The group and repertoire mainly consists of flute, clarinet, trombone, percussion, guitar, piano, violin, cello, bass, and voice. Ninth Planet New Music is led by conductor and artistic director Nat Berman. Ed can be heard playing percussion in their recent album release Wild Rumpus: In Time.

The William Winant Percussion Group is one of Grammy-nominated percussionist William Winant’s many musical projects. This group performs repertoire of composers like Lou Harrison, Steve Reich, James Tenney, and many more. Ed has performed periodically with this group over the last few years, notably at Other Minds Festival 22, performing in Harrison’s Suite for Violin and American Gamelan and La Koro Sutro at San Francisco’s Mission Dolores Basilica.

The Lightbulb Ensemble was a new music percussion ensemble that incorporated contemporary Balinese gamelan played on innovatively built percussion instruments. The ensemble performed on steel, aluminum, and bronze metallophones, wooden marimbas, and other gamelan-inpsired instruments that were designed and built by ensemble founder and composer Brian Baumbusch. Ed Garcia performed often with the Lightbulb Ensemble, starting in 2016 for Baumbusch’s premiere of Hamsa in at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, and at the Roulette in Brooklyn, NY.

Gamelan X is an Oakland-based band that blends marching gamelan music and instruments of Bali, Indonesia, with non-Indonesian compositional and performance formats. A band consisting of several large gongs, hand cymbals, drums, and octaves of other tuned metallophones, Gamelan X has worn many musical faces throughout its 15+ years: Balinese marching beleganjur, Burning Man marching band competitions, ecstatic dance, moneky chant, collaborations with horns and strings, staged dance accompaniments, pop tune covers, and the avant-garde. Ed Garcia joined the group in 2010, and served as artistic director from 2016-2018, prior to his departure to Indonesia for his Fulbright grant. Ed composed many pieces and directed interesting projects for Gamelan X during this tenure, such as the staged dance piece Division: The Guardian and the Thief and the samba/horn/gamelan collaboration Sambelan.

Falkortet was a new music percussion quartet and composer collective based in San Francisco. Falkortet composed all their own music, drawing inspiration from avant-garde, minimalism, jazz, gamelan, and samba. Ed Garcia can be seen playing drumset and other percussion instruments in this video of Falkortet member Tim Black’s composition Of Wind and Metal.

Import/Export was a trio featuring group leader/ethnomusicologist/vocalist Robert Beahrs, double bassist Brian Ellingson, and percussionist Ed Garcia. The project consisted of sung words, Tuvan throat-singing, and nature sound effects by Beahrs, mulitple layers of bass melodies by Ellingson, and Sundanese kendang rhythms by Garcia. A recording of Beahr’s piece “The Yellow Trotter (Chyraa-xor)” can be heard here.