Music and Dance Reviews : Moss a One-Man Band at Beyond Baroque

If all the ethnic traditions of the world somehow vanished, percussionist David Moss might very likely be able to re-invent them.

For that matter, if every radio in the world suddenly stopped working, Moss probably would be able to pick up and rebroadcast all the signals bouncing around the ether, including some not available on mere earthly machines.

An apparently inexhaustible one-man band, Moss electronically manipulated drum beats and a host of other percussive sounds, his husky baritone (and not so husky falsetto) and even his breathing in an engaging and inventive recital of untitled works Saturday at Beyond Baroque in Venice.

Sometimes the experience resembled careening down a freeway and flipping from station to station on the radio, catching a lot of static and not much clear programming, but still getting a sense that something interesting was happening.

At other times, Moss sounded like a perplexed Tevye, playful amid the madly alien circuitry.

But the Vermont-based percussionist had quickly established virtuosic credentials. One way of grasping his (not always successful) experiments in the boundaries between music and noise was to focus on the extremes by which he defined the sound spectrum, and how, within that, he layered in textures. And, above all, how complex he could make the counterpoint.

To close, Los Angeles soprano Anna Homler joined Moss in two wonderful soap opera-like dialogues of made-up middle-European-sounding languages.

Some might want to use a term like deconstruction to describe Moss’ methods. But one critic would prefer to think of him as the Mel Blanc of new music specialists.