Kaiser Stays on Schedule With Opera ‘Aurea Catena’ : Composer meets his personal timetable with latest work. He calls it an electro-acoustic chamber performance.

For Jeff Kaiser, Ventura’s wily and ambitious new music composer-activist, it’s another year, another opus.

In the ‘90s thus far, Kaiser has maintained his agenda of completing and staging one large compositional work per year. “Without a deadline, I don’t do anything,” he said in an interview last week. “Without any goals, I’m rudderless.”

Last year, Kaiser mounted his first opera, “Rooster Brings Heresy,” in a two-weekend run at the Plaza Players Theater in Ventura. That project proved to be a fairly herculean effort, with Dadaist overtones and a broad musical palette.

This year’s model, “Aurea Catena,” which will have one performance at the Odd Fellow’s Hall in Ventura on Saturday, represents a scaling back on some levels and a venturing outward on others. This will be Kaiser’s return to the, well, odd--but effective--venue of the Odd Fellow’s Hall, where he staged his “Requiem” two years ago.

A project Kaiser calls an electro-acoustic chamber opera, the hourlong “Aurea Catena” refers to the notion put forth by alchemists of “a golden chain of persons going back to the beginning of time that linked heaven and Earth.”

It was more than a year ago that Kaiser began conceiving the piece, after backing into an interest in Jungian psychology and ancient alchemy by reading novelist Philip Dick. Venturan Keith McMullen, a student of Kaiser’s, is a clinical psychologist with a Jungian bent, and the two ultimately wound up collaborating on the libretto.

Kaiser recalled: “I mentioned to Keith that I’d had this recurring dream since I was a child about having little wings on my hands and flying over my neighborhood. He pulled a book off his shelf and showed me a 13th-Century woodcut of an image that was very similar to what I was dreaming. Then he gave me a book called ‘Puer Aeternus,’ by James Hillman, which is a collection of essays. He did a study of somebody with the exact same dreams that I’d had.

“I figured I’d better do something with all of this. That is the convoluted way that I got into it.”

For the non-linear libretto of “Aurea Catena,” Kaiser said he “took three alchemical texts and pieced them together with some of my own dream images and things that I thought were interesting. Keith has a much more poetic bent than I do. I would give him the whole mess, one act at a time, and he would smooth out the edges, add a few more things and take away other things.”

The libretto draws on the writings of various historical “heretical” figures: Zosimos, a 3rd-Century Greek Gnostic; Melchior Cibinensis, a 16th-Century philosopher whose alchemical mass is woven into Kaiser’s score, and the enigmatic Hermes Trismegistus.

Don’t expect an easily grasped story line here. Just as Kaiser sought to create an atmospheric textural weave with his musical score, he described the text as being “sort of linear, but multilayered. Liz (Stuart, the vocalist) was going through it today in rehearsal, saying, ‘You know, there really is a plot going through this thing.’ I said, ‘Well, sometimes accidents like that happen,’ ” he said with a laugh.

In the opera, the role of the Puer Aeternus (the eternal youth) is sung by Stuart, the fine vocalist/keyboardist who has long been associated with new music in the area. The set is by Jeff Garcia, whom Kaiser met while both worked on the production of Beatrice Wood’s “Torch in the Sky” in Ojai last year.

The human instrumental ranks are Spartan, with Jim Connolly playing bass and Deborah Schwartz playing the marimba. Kaiser provides the balance of sonic material, via synthesis and sampling--the digital recording technique that Kaiser has worked with for several years.

“The sampling material uses everything from samples of myself from 10 years ago singing church songs, radio preachers, Tuvan singers, different Indian drummers, Balinese monkey chant--but it has all been run through the ringer and altered,” Kaiser said. “There is also the sound of my finger squeaking on wet plates.

“I use all sorts of things to create this soup of textures. Nothing really pops out.”

Generally, the nature of the piece is calm, by Kaiser’s sometimes manic standards. “It’s very static on stage, very still, a wash of aural and visual stimuli,” he said.

From early reports, this opera would seem to be a departure from the garrulous “Rooster Brings Heresy.”

“It pretty much is,” he said. “I wanted less lyricism and more texture. Still, people will recognize all the things that I like to do, particularly with the rhythmic things going on.”

At the same time Kaiser is pursuing creative life in that perilous world of the independent composer, he also performs, increasingly, with his experimental group Mahacuisinart. As heard again recently at Ventura City Hall as part of the Art Walk, the group is a bubbling caldron of jazz-related concepts, plenty of free improvisation and spicy doses of such seemingly unrelated music as Protestant hymns.

Alongside Connolly and drummer Robert Sterling, Kaiser plays a battery of brass instruments in whimsical and/or cathartic ways. In the course of a performance, he is also prone to wield a bullhorn or field organ in the pursuit of fun and frenzy.

Kaiser plans to make a recording with the group and to find performance opportunities outside Ventura County. Also on Kaiser’s horizon is a large-scale opera project, now in its formative stage, with several of the parties involved in “Torch in the Sky.”

Of this year’s opera, Kaiser is, typically, expansive and elusive. “I have a hard time describing it. It involves lots of little things.”

Perhaps the operatic medium is a good place for Kaiser, who seems to enjoy putting a lot of little things together.

“I’m going to stick with it. I plan on doing a bunch more. I love it, because it’s everything altogether. It’s the visual, it’s the literary, it’s the musical, the theatrical, it’s all that stuff.” And more.

Details

* WHAT: “Aurea Catena,” an electro-acoustic chamber opera.

* WHEN: Saturday at 8 p.m.

* WHERE: The Odd Fellows Hall, 522 E. Main St., Ventura.

* HOW MUCH: Tickets, $6.

* FYI: 643-4069.