EAR
Unit's Toughness and Tranquility
By JOSEF WOODARD
SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
Suitably
enough, the four-concert festival attached to the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art's "Made in California" exhibition ended with a Monday
Evening Concerts homecomiing. The California EAR Unit, raised on Southland
soil, gave a performance linked to the festival and its long-standing
LACMA residency. It was an evening chokablock with premieres, local
and global.
Unit players
Amy Knoles and Robin Lorentz gave world premieres of their own very
different pieces, both involving video. Lorentz's entrancingly spare
"Blind Window" eschewed virtuosity, with its palette of wind sounds
and desultory percdussion complementing Angie Bray's black-and-white
imagery of gently fluttering fabric. Knoles' "Squint" builds its rough,
tumbling mesh if rhythmic phrases around imagery, in a video by Richard
Hines and Knoles, of hypnotic slo-mo traffic.
The EAR Unit's
Rand Steiger honors a late UC San Diego colleague with his "For Marnie
Dilling" - in it Dorothy Stone's piccolo wandering ruefully through
a house-of-mirrors backdrop of pre-recorded flutes.
The ensemble's
flexibility was neatly showcased in Nicholas Frances Chase's "Sp!t",
the title's exclamation point justified by the work's brawling yet taut
energy, "Rite of Spring"-meets-Metallica accents and smart use of a
turntable. Steven Hoey's mercurial "Coloratura" brought out the group's
gift for shifting gracefully between atmospheric passages and intricate
coordination.
Michael Jon
Fink's "Before and After/I Hear it in the Rain" is an unapologetically
tranquil, meditative affair. Coaxing substance from seemingly vaporous
materials, it represented the West Coast Minimalist ambient school.
Bay Area
guitarist-composer Paul Dresher's "Chorale Times Two," from his Concerto
for Violin and Electro Acoustic Band, typifies his tidy, rock-influenced
touch. In the electro department, chordal washes on synthesizer, plug-in
textures from Knoles' MIDI-operated mallet instrument, and Dresher's
distorted electric guitar lines were in collusion and collision with
the acoustic elements of violin and bass clarinet. The melodic lines
riffed as if they were written-out improvisations, riding over dropping
chords.
That rock-ish
attitude segued naturally into the concert's one unplanned piece, a
raucous impromtu version of the Beatle's "Birthday" to toast Dresher's
50th. It was a giddy moment in an otherwise fairly somber outing by
EAR Unit standards.
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