MUSIC REVIEWS : Basso Bongo Duo Offers an Engaging Concert at Museum

The cutting edge of electronic music is no longer on new sounds and textures, but on ways of controlling and integrating those effects in live performance. The pioneering Basso Bongo duo of percussionist Amy Knoles and bassist Robert Black offered a survey for the latest Monday Evening Concert, at Bing Theater of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Biggest and best was Todd Winkler’s five-part suite “Things That Don’t Belong in Houses.” He matched lyrical, looped solos for Black with a high-energy drum kit foray and a nostalgically modal mallet movement for Knoles, the performers shaping the glossy electronic contributions with expressive zest, with the composer refereeing the premiere at the soundboard.

The only other drum music was in Knoles’ own “Men in the Cities,” which had extrovert vigor--inconsequentially garnished by Black--in its favor, and little connection to the Robert Longo slides projected above the performers other than hip poses.

Kirsten Vogelsang’s evocative, post-modern tone poem “Walks-All-Over-the-Sky” merged the live work into a taped tapestry. In this sort of incomplete symbiosis, neither element is essential to the music--the piece could have been all on tape, or all played live by a larger ensemble.

It was also hard to hear anything in Knoles’ mallet playing that couldn’t have been done on a keyboard. That is both the blessing and the bane of the ever-expanding flexibility of MIDI controllers. With equal access to banks of synthesized and sampled sounds, any electronic instrument can sound just like any other.

That also proved true in Eve Beglarian’s “Machaut in the Machine Age,” although her reworking of her minimalist reconstruction of “Douce dame jolie” sounded crisper--its layers more sharply defined, its gearing tighter--than in its earlier ensemble guise.

Beglarian has created a new partner adaptation, of the ballade “De toutes flours,” but any potential resonance between the pieces was shattered by a long technical hiatus while Knoles attempted to coax some sound from her suddenly silent paraphernalia. Once under way, “De toutes flours” was compromised by Black’s scratchy sound and wayward intonation in a little descending motive at the beginning and end of the piece.

There Black’s troubles might charitably be credited as a Gothic parody, but intonation was a recurrent problem for him.

It was not a factor in Paul Dresher’s “Mirrors,” a solo where he was on a MIDI bass guitar. The mirror image in sound, of course, is echoes, and the piece evolves recursively, the components quite obvious but no less effective for the sense of labored inevitability.

Also on the program was a minor collaborative work, “Big & Cheap,” by Black and Knoles, and David Lang’s deconstruction of the Steppenwolf classic “Born to Be Wild,” heavy on irony and inhibition.