...The appropriating work enters into a relationship with the appropriated material.  This relationship may be collaborative, confrontational, even downright violent, but it is always dialectical: signifier versus signifier. For Jarrod Fowler, this dialectic is rhythmic.  Or when thought in reverse, percussion is a dialectical process: one thing engaging, striking, or bouncing off another.  Fowler, a drummer by training, is fundamentally interested in the two-way, dialectical, appropriative relationship between two materials.  The interaction of drum skin and stick, for instance, shares important attributes with the interaction of text and voice.  Fowler engages the most basic unit of sound production: the beat. At the same time, he conceptualizes rhythm: the musical concern that, more than any other has defined the revolutions of twentieth-century music...Fowler's operations are, by turns, literally, figuratively, metaphorically, and metonymically rhythmic and/or percussive...Fowler has translated the dialectics of rhythm from a physical process of interaction into a conceptual process of interaction...Fowler's percussive dialectics extend beyond localized events in which one identifiable material impacts another. Each entity is already a product of differential processes.  The dialectical process is never as simple as 1 + 1 = 2.  Every 1 is also implicitly and unavoidably many. So the sum of 1 + 1 is closer to infinity.  Fowler's dialectic functions at a higher level of abstraction, colliding broad categories of practice to produce significant reverberations. Fowler's practice tests the tolerance of a discipline the way a structural engineer might test the tolerance of a steel foundation, investigating the discipline's abilities to withstand challenges to its integrity...For Fowler, this is merely another form of percussion: bodies and ideas coming into contact and producing noise...Like Kosuth, Fowler uses materials and disciplines both as generative apparatus and as content.  He makes no hierarchical distinction between theoretical work and practical work, allowing one to fold into the other until they are distinguishable only according to context or the expectations of a given spectator. This is certainly a performative act, practicing what it preaches...Fowler's choice of material and mode of manipulation takes into account it’s semantic, cultural, political, and philosophical implications. Fowler's work is about sound, not sound-in-itself.

- Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-cochlear Sonic Art, (Continuum2009), 230-240