A Multimedia Music Trip at Electronic Cafe

Traditionally, concerts are a real time, real space proposition. But that’s only part of the story behind the periodic “teleconcerts” at Santa Monica’s Electronic Cafe, which are linked by phone lines and other means to the College of Santa Fe and the Kitchen in New York City.

Last week, the cafe was a virtual depot for a five-day, mostly music, multimedia festival called “Three Sites/Multiple Views,” with provocative new work by Morton Subotnick, sample specialist Carl Stone and vocalist-composer Joan La Barbara. Despite a few glitches, technology emerged an ally of art.

On Saturday, Subotnick presented a work-in-progress, “Intimate Immensity,” whose technical complexities steered toward a surprisingly organic end. In Santa Monica, Subotnick’s controller keyboard triggered four Yamaha Disklaviers--digital player pianos--and similar instruments at the two other sites. La Barbara sang in Santa Fe, while baritone Thomas Buckner was stationed in New York, both supplying narrated text and wordless tones.

Despite the work’s derring-do, it’s fundamentally a physical experience. Real piano strings vibrated and live vocal parts meshed; live and abstract video images (the latter by Woody Vasulka) flashed. The work seems to be Subotnick’s reflection on life in cyberspace, both a valentine and a lament.

Also heard were meditative multiple-piano works by Morton Feldman, eloquently performed by Michael Jon Fink and Bridget Convey in Santa Monica, together with La Barbara and Peter Pesic in Santa Fe. On Friday night, La Barbara’s own “Events in the Elsewhere” deftly blended electronically altered voice with video images in a reflection on the vagaries of time and the universe.

Friday’s concert also featured the premiere of “Wei Fun” by Carl Stone. His undulatingly hip, groove-driven patchwork of samples was dispensed from a Macintosh, with a visual component hunted and gathered from TV, the Internet and his own animation. Here was cerebral dance music for the tuned-in set.