Musicians’ High-Tech Tribute to Dali : Homage: International composers interpret 10 works by the painter on a compact disc released under an Orange County label.

The late Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali spurred any number of artistic innovations in his lifetime, and even nearly two years after his death his work continues to inspire unique art projects.

“Dali: The Endless Enigma” is an homage on a compact disc to the late painter, which, though it features an international array of electronic music composers, is the product of an “Orange County garage label,” as Walter Holland describes his Orange-based Coriolis Records.

On the album, composers such as Germany’s Klaus Schulze, Spain’s Michel Huygen, American synthesists Steve Roach, Michael Stearns, Holland and others give their audio interpretations of 10 Dali paintings.

Holland, 35, teaches courses in electronic music and computer graphics at UC Irvine. He also teaches at UCLA and Orange’s Chapman College and does consulting work as an engineer. At home in Orange County, he presides over a $300,000 “museum” of electronic music gear, including some of music pioneer Robert Moog’s original ‘60s-synthesizer prototypes. He has recorded as a solo artist and with the band Amber Route for his own label.

The idea for the project began with fellow composer Loren Nerell, who, having seen “some requiem or another” on PBS, suggested to Holland it would be a good idea for local composers to assemble a requiem project. Just who the honored dead would be went undecided until the idea was proposed to Roach, playfully described by Holland as “America’s best-known composer of ‘adult contemporary space music’ “--who said, “Oh, you mean for someone like Salvador Dali?” Dali’s art, Holland found, was used as a visual inspiration by several composers, which was fine with Holland, a Dali fanatic himself.

“When we started talking to the artists and researching the whole thing we discovered very quickly that it is extremely common for musical artists to be inspired by visual work, and Dali was a frequent source,” he said.

That shared affinity ultimately proved helpful in engaging composers in the project.

“Each artist had his agents and managers. Trying to deal nationally and internationally with all these people turned out to be a nightmare because you have to go through all these various levels of defense. For example, you have to establish some credibility on why you should even be talking with these people, and once you do that you have to establish if there will be sufficient financial motivation for the artist to become involved.

“As it turned out, once you got through all those initial barriers, most of the artists really did have an interest in Dali, and they really didn’t care about the money or any of the other obstacles that the managers were trying to put up initially.”

Though only Tangerine Dream founder Schulze approaches being a household name--and that only in strange households--most of the album’s composers have a long track record in electronic music. Schulze, of course, is “the grandfather of Teutonic synthesizer music,” as Holland describes him. Spaniard Huygen has recorded 12 albums with his country’s top electronic group, Neuronium.

Stearns composed the music for the IMAX film “Kronos.” Roach’s recordings reach a wide audience through airplay on WAVE-formatted stations. Bo Tomlyn is an in-demand studio synthesist and designer of synth voices, who has worked with everyone from Talking Heads to Toto. The other artists on “Dali: The Endless Enigma” are Nerell, Robert Rich and the Pomona-area band Djam Karet.

Each musician selected a Dali painting and put his impressions of it into sound. Describing the process, Holland said: “I think what most of us did was we each got a reproduction of the work and just put it in our studio and lived with it for several months, and looked at it every time we sat down at the keyboard. Then we would pick sound colors, from our palette of sounds, if you will, and started composing using the sounds and feelings we derived from the paintings.”

Initially, Holland had planned to include a photo of each of the interpreted paintings in the CD booklet, until he found that obtaining the rights and other costs would add up to about $25,000. Instead, the booklet has photos of the composers. Holland’s was shot at Costa Mesa’s Noguchi Gardens, which he describes as “looking like a Dali painting, except you can walk around in it.” They were able to afford one Dali work, “Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano,” which graces the front and back cover of the CD.

The CD is somewhat hard to obtain, because its first pressing sold out, with most copies going to European and East Coast distributors. (One place that stocks the album is the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla.). When the label gets its second pressing in mid-January, it should be available at Tower, Digital Ear and other local outlets.

Though the composers were attempting to convey particular visions in their sounds, Holland said he realizes there’s no guarantee listeners will derive the same images.

“I think that’s true of any form of creative medium, where the listener, reader or viewer will always have impressions considerably different and unique from what you were thinking about, but they may be along the same lines. The important thing is that you somehow move the listener. I’m not sure that the direction you move them in is really of that much significance.”

Holland said he doesn’t think Dali, who died Jan. 23, 1989, at age 84, would have been put off by the armada of high-tech equipment at work on the album.

“He was always into the latest technology. Dali was a very well-informed scientist, apart from being an artist. He was always looking into things like holography and computer manipulation of images, image-processing technology and optics. So I don’t think the technology involved would have bothered him at all.”

But would he have liked the tribute?

“That’s a tough one. I don’t know, but I think he would have liked them. I think each of the artists did a real good job of interpreting the paintings, according to my aesthetic standards. And I think since all of the artists really do have a kind of intuitive link with Dali, I don’t think we would have done anything so out of character that he would have been offended by the work.”

“But,” Holland said with a laugh, “I could be totally wrong.”