EAR Unit Essays Eclectic Work by Bryars

Depending on the ear of the beholder, British composer Gavin Bryars’ rather infamous piece “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet” can be either uniquely profound or mind-numbingly dull. When the forward-leaning California EAR Unit gave the 1971 work its belated Los Angeles premiere Wednesday at the L.A. County Museum of Art, much of the audience seemed to be of the sympathetic ilk.

Like other composers dealing with minimal materials, Bryars often relies on repetition as a driving force, shaping music and forcing us to examine time in a new way. Here, the repeated material has a life of its own: a scratchy recording of an elderly, indigent British man singing five lines of a hymn, looped ad delirium.

Colorations and musical commentary are added by the ensemble on hand--in the EAR Unit’s case, guitar, accordion, synthesizers, harmonica and more traditional chamber music instruments. But the real power of this odd jewel comes from the street singer’s own humble assertion of belief, fed into a dream machine of the composer’s devising.

Otherwise, it was business as eclectically usual on the program. Shaun Naidoo’s “Ararat” is a loosely programmatic piece based on the Noah’s Ark story, with a bustling energy that goes nowhere, for no apparent reason. Korean composer Yoon Hee Kim-Hwang’s “Yunhoe” (Reincarnation) presents an evolving cycle of motifs resembling a sterner-pitched version of Morton Feldman’s music.

Todd Winkler’s “Stomping the Ground” is a showpiece written for percussionist Amy Knoles, who commandeered a compact drum controller over a dizzying range of sampled and computer-manipulated sounds. Ronald Bruce Smith’s Paul Klee-inspired “Remembrances of a Garden” is an evocative pastiche of twittering, slithering chords in a charged sonic space, delivered freshly and enigmatically by the musicians.