Celebrating SISU´s 15th Anniversary
- 1st installment

Written by Lars Igesund (producer) on Dec 10 2008

This picture shows the three original members of SISU: From left to right: Rolf Lennart Stensø, Tomas Nilsson and Rune Halvorsen.

This year SISU Percussion Ensemble celebrate their 15th anniversary as a professional percussion ensemble. We do this by presenting pictures and stories that have made the ensemble what it is today.

The first concert (almost)

It may seem as though we have converted the photo to black and white with the intention of making it look like something from the fifties or sixties, but we didn´t. 

The photo is actually from 1994 (maybe the haircuts give the game away?) and the first real SISU concert ever. Not the first outing, that came a year before when SISU participated in a concert containing among other things Wallins piece Too much of a good thing for percussion and 6 electric guitars, but the first complete and exclusively SISU concert.  

The concert was part of the Ultima Contemporary Music Festival that year, and definitely not our last contribution to Ultima. Ultima and Sisu have been assosiated regularly through the years. The piece played here is NANAWATAI by Håkon Berge, also a premiere in itself. NANAWATAI became a kind of hit for several years thereafter.  Music by Jon Persen (Kanon, premiere performance) and Xenakis (Okho, first performance in Norway) made up the rest of this historical concert. 

With what must have looked like a very deliberate and self-concious move, SISU entered the stage and started to play immediately without hesitation, not even nodding to the audience or doing the common routines of waiting for everyone to be quiet before starting to play. We simply entered quickly, picked up the sticks and started. The effect was staggering.

Not known to many people, of course, is the fact that the desicion to do this was made backstage just minutes before the performance started. Someone said: “What if we just... that would be cool!”. Not really certain that the sticks were in the right place and ready to be picked up in a very short time, they nevertheless did it. We gambled, and maybe won some fans over before even the first sounds entered. This way to start the concerts has became a sort of trademark of the ensemble. 

“Sisu have found their very own sound, and their concerts is more like performances than regular concerts. It is with great strenght and fine precision that they have build their personal style, a style that both arrangers and audience talks about with great admiration.”
Leif Karlsson, Kroumata (Sweden)

“"Focus" is the key-word for SISU. Focus: burning exactness. Three powerful personalities tightly clustering around sound. It seems they made the best use of the last 15 years. We are looking forward to being overwhelmed by what they'll forge in the next 15! Go ahead, please - we need it, we deserve it!"
Dario Buccino, composer (Italy)