MUSIC REVIEW : EAR Unit Ventures Into Rock, Multimedia

As California EAR Unit shows go, Wednesday night’s foray at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art went down easily, but not lightly. In this week’s edition, the heroic local new music ensemble boasted three West Coast premieres, marked by detectable doses of theatricality, textural focus and rock ‘n’ roll residue. There was nary a scratched head in the house.

“Monkey Trips,” collectively created by New Zealand-born Annea Lockwood and the EAR Unit, is a programmatic opus based on Tibetan Buddhist ideology, in which each instrument took on a specific character. Dee A. McMillan’s projections provided gently abstract visual impressions as the players wove an improvisationally based patchwork, shifting from introspection to controlled abandon to comedic flair. The whole shebang ended in laughter--literally.

The concert’s second half was stocked with music by mid-life composers who are also electric guitarists, wont to distill energies from rock ‘n’ roll. Scott Johnson’s “Rent Party,” your basic paean to noble artist-brand poverty, discurses ably, if aimlessly, in a Copland-cum-Hindemith palette. Hints of the progressive rock era also surfaced within the breathless, snug interplay--too snug, really--between violin and cello, played with alert focus by Robin Lorentz and Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick, respectively. In his witty program notes, Johnson exercised his ability to make his music sound like more fun than it actually is.

Johnson’s contemporary, Paul Dresher, provided the evening’s finale, “Stretch,” a pleasant enough romp written specifically for the EAR Unit that freely blends natural real-time activity with digitally altered, “stretched” time psycho-sheen. Dresher’s scheme emphasizes both the mechanistic and the organically flowing aspects of its unapologetically post-minimalist patter. The work’s synthetic--and sometimes shrill--timbres, quasi-exotic modes and a rockish drive added up to a visceral, if not especially enlightening experience.

Wednesday’s program proved to be a well-intentioned, well-played, and, this time out, abidingly accessible trip to the new music well.