Listening to Harmony of Noise and Ice in ‘Jang Toh’ : Computer-Shaped Sounds, Falling Stones Create a Multisensory Montage

Carl Stone may not have set out to fulfill a prophecy, but he’s done it anyway.

In John Cage’s 1937 manifesto, “The Future of Music,” the composer and patron saint of the anti-academic avant-garde foresaw a music made of noise, “whether the sound of a truck at 50 m.p.h., rain, or static between radio stations.” What that meant for Cage was an ensemble whose members played flowerpots, brake drums and beer bottles.

Five decades later, when Carl Stone hunts similar sonic game, he does it with a portable tape recorder and a good microphone. Leaving a tidy, tiny house in a viewless ravine in the Hollywood Hills, he sallies forth to bring back the sounds of crickets, cars and barking dogs, which he then dumps into a Macintosh computer for treatment. Somewhere at the other end of a chain of mixers, processors and typed instructions, music issues.

“Jang Toh,” a piece created by Stone in collaboration with Los Angeles-based Japanese sculptor Mineko Grimmer, can be seen and heard until Oct. 23 at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Stone’s music, which was built on about a dozen minutes of nature sounds culled from 40 to 50 hours of location recording, is played on tape except for live performances Oct. 14 and 15.

The music in “Jang Toh,” named like all Stone pieces for one of his favorite Los Angeles eateries, complements a construction by Grimmer, who works in the uncommon, slowly kinetic medium of melting ice. Over an intricate bamboo latticework, which itself is built over a pool, she suspends a block of ice into which stones have been frozen. As the ice melts, the stones drop, ricochet through the sculpture and fall finally into the pool.

Museum director Tom Rhoades said the collaborators, though coming from different disciplines, share similar concerns. Grimmer’s sculpture, like Stone’s music, involves that “John Cage-ian thing,” Rhoades said, of natural sound and randomly generated events.

Indeed, Grimmer was Stone’s student in a class on contemporary music he taught at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. This is their second collaboration.

Stone’s work has often been shaped by an interest in Japanese art. “They deal with time differently from the West; things are scaled more broadly,” said Stone over a glass of iced Japanese buckwheat tea.

“The breath is more important; the natural cycles of life are more important. It’s something I’d like to connect with more, and that I feel I’ve articulated in working with Mineko, because her sculptures are so profoundly based on the natural rhythm--ice melting, stones dropping. I wanted to develop a piece that complemented that by also using slowly evolving textures developed out of the sounds of the real world.

“The tapes themselves will be fairly static--there won’t be a lot of short-term development. The music itself is paced pretty broadly, tied to the natural rhythm. It’s not a heavy, dramatic, event-oriented thing.”

At the live performances, he will manipulate source material through a Macintosh computer and three DAT recorders, like a Caltech version of a rap Mixmaster. But Stone, who has brought audiences to their feet with his past manipulations of Motown-based music, plans to stay in the background. In “Jang Toh,” he wants to “de-emphasize my own performance and the audience’s expectation of drama, and somehow get them relaxed so that the music washes over them.”

“But it does have a program,” he said. “It definitely starts here and ends up there, and my task is to keep people on the path and following without getting bored.”

Next month, Stone leaves for six months in Japan, sponsored by the Asian Cultural Council, to perform and to create a new piece involving the sounds of urban Tokyo. He also hopes to contact and perhaps collaborate with Japanese composers and musicians, “especially those who haven’t been part of the critical hierarchy.”

It won’t be his first trip there--he tours extensively, and in the last couple of years has performed not only in Tokyo and on Japanese radio and television, but in Paris, Cologne, Amsterdam, Stockholm and Italy. He has also appeared at museums, colleges and in the artier rock clubs across this country.

At 35, he’s still young for a serious musician, yet already uncommonly experienced.

Stone, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, was rejected by Morton Subotnick of the CalArts electronic music department when he applied for admission in 1969, but showed up anyway. Stone used the facilities and did so well that Subotnick wound up awarding him a scholarship. Upon graduation, Stone joined with several friends to found the Independent Composers Assn. to promote and stage performances of their work. From 1978 to 1981, he was the music director of KPFK-FM, for which he still plays host at the weekly experimental music program “Imaginary Landscape,” and he was artistic co-director of the seventh New Music America Festival when it was held in Los Angeles in 1985.

He has collaborated with choreographers Rudy Perez, Ping Chong and Remy Charlip, performance artist Rachel Rosenthal, and video artists Bruce and Norman Yonemoto. He also directs the California branch of Meet the Composer, part of a nationwide network that aims to connect composers of new music with grants and with audiences. His albums are available from Wizard Records, New Underground and Music Arts.

Seminal minimalist Steve Reich called Stone’s “Dong Il Jang” “genuinely witty and intelligent. The Village Voice dubbed him “the King of Sampling.”

It’s quite a portfolio, but Stone knows his limits. “At a recent performance in San Francisco,” he said, “I was playing along, and my computer crashed. But in crashing, it didn’t shut down everything--sounds were still happening; there was a lot going on. But at that point I had no control; things just took off without me.

“And it was sort of humbling,” he continued with a laugh, “because it was quite nice, actually. It was very interesting.”