As a supremely versatile arranger and composer who has collaborated with a daunting array of artists in rock, pop, hip-hop and beyond, Magik*Magik Orchestra’s Minna Choi knows that music can’t exist without silence.
A recent epiphany about the similarly critical role that rest plays in human flourishing led to Magik*Magik’s latest endeavor, “Cocoon,” which is billed as San Francisco’s first-ever orchestra sleepover concert. Taking place Sept. 26-27 at Grey Area/Grand Theater, it’s modeled after Max Richter’s overnight events performing the music from his 8.5-hour album “Sleep,” which the German-British musician has presented around the world (but never in the Bay Area).
The idea came to Choi when she was writing a chart using the popular notation software Sibelius, “and I thought, a rest is not a neutral, empty gap,” she said. “It’s an intentional space of no sound. Music itself is made of two elements, sound and rest. For music to sound beautiful it must contain rest, which hit me as a life metaphor. We breathe in and breathe out. Farmers plant fields and then and leave them fallow.”
The Mission District gallery hosting the “Cocoon” is fertile ground for this experiment in vulnerability. Ticket holders are invited to show up in their pajamas, as Grey Area doesn’t have much private space for changing.
One of the orchestra’s first orders of business, after finding the right performance space, was procuring about 100 cots, “because I don’t want people sleeping on the floor, though that would be very Bay Area,” Choi said. “And we can’t afford beds, like Max Richter.”
A friend who performs with Awesöme Orchestra Collective, which rehearses regularly at Sports Basement in Berkeley, suggested that she get in touch with the company. There was a lot of back and forth with Sports Basement personnel, nationally and locally, and during one communications lull she called the Presidio store and randomly reached Michael, who was thereafter known in Magik*Magik circles as Happy Sports Basement Guy.
“He got so into it, and really made it happen,” she recalled. “He said, ‘This is exactly the kind of thing Sports Basement wants to do.”
“Cocoon” opens with an hour-long concert featuring a 15-piece ensemble playing Magik*Magik instrumental favorites by composers such as Zöe Keating, Chris Walla, Arvo Pärt, Hildegard von Bingen, Christina Vantzou, and Max Richter.
Once the performance is done, phones and other screens will be stowed through the night. Brooklyn-based Tai Bendit will be in town to lead some guided meditations, lulling listeners into slumber. Magik*Magik greets the days with the premiere of Choi’s newly composed 25-minute piece “timed to sunrise at 7:01, starting very softly,” she said. “You don’t notice it has started, and it gradually gets louder and louder way in a beckoning way.”
Opening a new chapter for the orchestra in the Mission is something of a homecoming for Choi. She launched Magik*Magik as a graduate student of composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 2008 while living at 16th and Dolores.
A regular at Maxfield’s Coffee around the corner, she drew up the original business plan there. Over the next five years or so the ensemble gained fans amongst their musical peers by working steadily as the house orchestra at John Vanderslice’s original Tiny Telephone studio on San Bruno Avenue, specializing in providing arrangements for rock and pop acts.
Magik*Magik’s success has been a blessing and a curse. As an indie arts organization it’s been hard to shake off a scarcity mentality, which has meant regularly working to exhaustion. In just the past year the orchestra contributed to a panoply of concerts, soundtracks and albums, including projects by Moses Sumney, Queens of the Stone Age, Mountain Goats, Faye Webster, Thao, and the Tune-Yards score for Boots Riley’s “I Love Boosters.”
In many ways, “Cocoon” was born out of the headlong sprint through 2025, “our best and busiest year, which left me a burnt-out corpse,” Choi said. It wasn’t just the numerous work-for-hire gigs. Magik*Magik also raised funds for the orchestra’s own projects. Left bedridden at the start of 2026, Choi decided to search for a third path around the feast-or-famine binary.
Rather than following the exhausting logic of relentless growth, she wondered “what would happen if our organization looked more like a zigzag,” she said. “After a big year, the next one we rest a little bit and not consider it a failure if we have a slower year.”
“Cocoon” manifests that philosophy, inviting the audience to rest with the orchestra (though of course producing the project has required a considerable amount of labor). It’s just a coincidence that Magik*Magik follows up the foray into the Land of Nod by providing sonic stimulation for Michael Pollan’s conference “States of Consciousness: Psychedelic Discovery and the Edge of Uncertainty” Oct. 14-15 at UC Berkeley’s Clark Kerr Campus Conference Center (sorry, it’s sold-out).
Choi has assembled a capaciously creative ensemble to enhance various lectures, sessions and situations, including cellist Theresa Wong, flutist Diane Grubbe, Graham Viagut on percussion, Choi on keyboards, and Pete Angevine on percussion and relevant psychedelic experience. For maximum trippyness, she’s also rented 10 singular instruments from Bart Hopkin’s Instrumentarium.
“We want people to be like, what is that?” Choi said.
But before exploring the contours of consciousness, Choi gets a chance to lie down with friends old and new while experiencing the simple pleasures of restorative repose. To sleep, perchance to dream, and embrace the pause that allows creativity to emerge.
“Now I can confidently say rest is not only essential to being able to carry on,” Choi said, “but in separating beauty from chaos.”
