FaultLines Series Tries to Lower Walls

Uptown and downtown are New York’s arrogantly proprietary new music labels, and the rest of the country is stuck with them. Uptown is where Columbia University is, and that has come to stand for the more academic approach to composition; downtown Manhattan is home to the feisty experimentalists, improvisers and genre-breakers.

In Los Angeles, however, the actual geography has long been just the reverse, what with CalArts far uptown and USC downtown. But Tuesday night a real “downtown” venue, the 24th Street Theatre, not far from USC, began a new music series that has all the potential to become just the scene the local new music community desperately needs.

The series, FaultLines, is organized by composers Art Jarvinen and Shaun Naidoo, and is still rudimentary. There is, as yet, little opportunity for planning--concerts will happen when the theater would be otherwise dark, and schedules are not set in stone, nor is there any kind of financial support. Word, moreover, still has to get out.

But the theater is perfect for new music. It has a large friendly lobby and the performance space, surrounded by seats on three sides, is intimate but large enough and with high ceilings to give the louder musicians acoustic elbow room.

The inaugural concert Tuesday was also the debut of Jarvinen’s new group Some Over History, composed of violin (Robin Lorentz), bass clarinet (Marty Walker) and trombone (Toby Holmes). This is a more tractable combination than it might seem, particularly with Jarvinen filling in, here on percussion, there on bass guitar; playing deconstructed blues harmonica; or turning dials and sending all his players into ecstatic feedback heaven.

Jarvinen is a hip, versatile and sophisticated musician, and Some Over History is current in its concerns. It comfortably balances composed music with improvisation, acoustic with electronics, intricate composition with rock bass lines.

It proved the most impressive in “The Hole Flow Symphony,” a work-in-progress that explores the surprisingly rich possibilities of feedback, producing grainy sheets of sounds with the kind of colored, layered, irregular, rich textures of an early Rauschenberg combine--bits and pieces of just about anything made fascinating together.

A performance artist from San Francisco, Sten Rudstrom, was also on hand, as a lounge singer from hell singing psychotic Beatles covers. Crazy Beatles, I’m afraid, is already a tired genre, having been all the fad in Manhattan’s downtown new music in the early ‘90s.

FaultLines hopes to break down not only walls between new classical music, jazz and pop, but also between new music north and south. But there are still a few cobwebs to wipe away.